A priority forwarding technique for efficient and fast flooding in wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a new technique, called priority forwarding, for efficient and fast flooding operations in wireless ad hoc networks. The new scheme is featured by dynamic delay and priority checking. The former feature allows a host to wait as long as possible to refrain from retransmission, minimizing retransmission overhead. The priority checking feature, on the other hand, allows a flooding packet to be propagated as quickly as possible, keeping flooding latency low. Unlike many location-aided flooding techniques, priority forwarding requires each host to know only the distance of its 1-hop neighbors, instead of their exact locations. Therefore, it has low implementation cost. For performance evaluation, we compare priority forwarding with some existing techniques using simulation. Our results show that under most scenarios, the new technique performs many times better in reducing packet retransmissions and flooding latency.