Self-Pruning Broadcasting for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is a process of delivering a message to all nodes in a network. While it is important to ensure that all nodes get a copy of the broadcast message, minimizing the number of sending nodes is equally important especially in resource-constrained wireless networks. Existing broadcasting protocols based on self-pruning are ineffective in achieving these objectives. Therefore this paper proposes two protocols based on simple timer mechanisms to prioritize broadcasting of messages such that node with most uncovered neighbors rebroadcast first. Additionally a timer suppression mechanism is proposed to further enhance the effectiveness of the broadcasting protocol. Compared with an existing protocol, extensive simulation experiments confirm that the proposed protocols achieve better performance.