An Efficient Heuristic Gossiping Mechanism in Ad Hoc Routing

Many ad hoc routing protocols are based on some variant of flooding. Despite various optimizations, many routing messages are propagated unnecessarily. In this paper, we propose a heuristic gossiping-based approach, where each node forwards a message with some probability according to the residual energy of a node, its velocity, and the information from its neighbor, to reduce the overhead of the routing protocols. In the network topology we have considered, this simple heuristic gossiping-based protocol reduces routing load by 48% compared with conventional flooding, and with other performances improved meanwhile. Our gossiping mechanism can also be combined with various optimizations of flooding to yield further benefits. Simulations show that adding heuristic gossiping mechanism to DSR results in significant performance improvements.