Dual covered broadcast with negative acknowledgements for enhanced reliability in Mobile Ad Hoc networks

Broadcasting in ad hoc networks, widely utilized as a building block for many network layer protocols is prone to broadcast storm problem. This problem necessitates to carefully designate some nodes in the one-hop neighborhood of the sender as forwarding nodes and reduce broadcast redundancy. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called Dual Covered broadcast with Negative acknowledgements (DCN) which focuses on achieving high delivery ratio in an environment that has high transmission error rate. We make use of negative acknowledgements (NACK) to reduce broadcast collision and achieve enhanced reliability. Overhead caused due to acknowledgements are avoided by allowing the sender to overhear the transmissions from the receiver. Broadcast congestion is alleviated by eliminating the unnecessary duplication of packets, otherwise resulting in Broadcast storm problem. Simulation results show that DCN algorithm improves the reliability of broadcast operation compared to Double Covered Broadcast (DCB) and use lower number of forwarding nodes in the network.