Intelligent broadcast in wireless ad hoc networks using live packet information

Broadcasting is one of the most important operations for wireless ad hoc networks. A conventional broadcast method is to flood packets where each node rebroadcasts received packets. This approach is simple and reliable, but it suffers from the problems of network congestion, resource contention and signal collision. In this paper we propose new approaches to improve broadcast efficiency by stamping the information of visited nodes and their neighbor knowledge along the broadcasted packets. The live packet information is utilized intelligently to reduce broadcast redundancy in wireless ad hoc networks. Several stamping schemes are evaluated and the simulation results show that they can improve broadcast efficiency very significantly.