Efficient Lightweight Broadcasting Protocols for Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is an indispensable operation for multi-hop mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to provide control or routing functionalities. In MANET, since a packet relayed by any node can reach all its neighbour nodes, broadcasting by flooding is inefficient and results in many redundant relays. In this paper, we analyze the deficiencies of some previous broadcasting protocols and propose two enhanced lightweight protocols, namely hop count-aided broadcasting (HCAB) and self-adaptive probability broadcasting (SAPB). The proposed protocols can reduce broadcasting redundancy significantly and guarantee high broadcasting coverage as well. More importantly, the proposed protocols are lightweight, which means each node makes relay decision without any knowledge of its neighbours. Thus, the proposed protocols have low overhead and are attractive to capacity limited mobile devices. Simulation results show that the proposed protocols eliminate unnecessary relay efficiently and outperform the existing lightweight broadcasting protocols