EDAB: energy-efficient diffusion algorithm for broadcast in wireless ad hoc networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, broadcasting is widely used by routing protocols to disseminate link/node state information or route discovery requests. However, broadcasting by blind flooding is highly energy-intensive and may involve serious redundancy, contention, and collision known as a broadcast storm problem. In this paper, two schemes are proposed to improve broadcasting performance and energy consumption called fair energy-efficient flooding and probabilistic energy-efficient flooding respectively. Both schemes periodically perform a fully localized average-based diffusion algorithm to estimate the average network energy (ANE). Scheme I utilizes ANE to decide whether to forward a broadcast message or not. Scheme II uses probabilistic rebroadcasting by referring to ANE. Our simulation results show different levels of improvement as compared with related approaches.