An adjusted counter-based broadcast scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Broadcasting is a fundamental and frequently used operation in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) where a source node diffuses a message to all other nodes in the networks. Flooding, the process in which each node retransmits every uniquely received packet exactly once is the simplest and most commonly used mechanism for broadcasting in MANETs. Despite its simplicity, it can result in high redundant retransmission, contention and collision, a phenomenon collectively referred to as the broadcast storm problem, which can greatly increase the network communication overhead. This paper proposes an adjusted counter-based scheme which combines the advantages of probability and counter-based approaches to mitigate this inherent problem. The scheme is simple, efficient and uses two rebroadcast probabilities to differentiate between mobile nodes in sparse and dense area as against dropping the rebroadcast packet when a node is in dense area. We evaluate the performance of our scheme by comparing it against flooding, fixed probability and counter-based schemes. Simulation results reveal that our scheme achieves better performance in terms of saved rebroadcast, end-to-end delay and without sacrificing reachability.