Analysis of packet flooding in dense MANETs using a probabilistic model

Flooding is a decisive aspect of mobile ad hoc networks. A number of efficient flooding schemes have been proposed to suppress redundant rebroadcasts as simple flooding causes broadcast storm problem. For example, a cellular automata based flooding scheme inspired by the organ growth control in cell biology is proposed in [1]. These protocols may fail to reach all the nodes for global broadcast in the process of suppressing the redundant rebroadcasts. Though the protocols are evaluated using simulations extensively it is essential to develop a robust theoretical model to analyze and compare performance of different flooding protocols. However there is only a little work in this area. In this research, we base on Viswanath-Obraczka [2] and the underlying Wu-Varshney [3] models that theoretically analyze reachability in multihop flooding in mobile ad hoc networks. We applied the model to a sample scenario and the analysis shows that flooding fails to reach all the nodes in the network in the presence of hidden terminal problem and collisions. The reachability was found to increase asymptotically with the increasing number of retransmission and the parameters can be tuned to improve the reachability.