An efficient reliable broadcasting protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has recently been recognized as an attractive network architecture for wireless communication. Reliable broadcast is an important operation in MANET (e.g., giving orders, searching routes, and notifying important signals). However, using a naive flooding to achieve reliable broadcasting may be very costly, causing a lot of contention, collision, and congestion, to which we refer as the broadcast storm problem. This paper proposes an efficient reliable broadcasting protocol by taking care of the potential broadcast storm problem that could occur in the medium-access level. Existing protocols are either unreliable, or reliable but based on a too costly approach. Our protocol differs from existing protocols by adopting a low-cost broadcast, which does not guarantee reliability, as a basic operation. The reliability is ensured by additional acknowledgement and handshaking. Simulation results do justify the efficiency of the proposed protocol.