Distance-based dynamically adjusted probabilistic forwarding for wireless mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Flooding is a fundamental and effective data dissemination mechanism for route discovery, address resolution and many other network services in MANET, cause redundant rebroadcasts, which in result leads to the broadcast storm problem. Although many approaches have been proposed to solve the broadcast storm problem, none have been regarded as the satisfying solution. In this paper, we propose a distance-based dynamically adjusted probabilistic forwarding scheme and compare it with simple flooding and fixed probabilistic schemes. Our approach dynamically adjusts the rebroadcast probability according to the distance from the sender. The adaption is based only on distance without the assistance of neighbor knowledge. The proposed scheme keeps up the reachability of blind flooding while maintaining the simplicity of probability based schemes.