Routing with adaptive flooding in heterogeneous mobile networks

In practice, Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) must operate efficiently under a wide range of node mobility and link quality regimes. Stateful protocols such as OLSR are suitable for networks connected by stable paths, but are outperformed by stateless flooding in sparse and rapidly changing networks. Neither routing nor flooding alone perform well in heterogeneous networks comprised of both stable and highly dynamic components. Rather than design a new protocol for routing in heterogeneous mobile networks from scratch, we use an approach that leverages prior work by operating nodes individually as routers or flooders and switching mode in response to changing network conditions. We present two greedy algorithms, k-flood and adaptive-flood, that dynamically classify nodes as routers or flooders. Our simulations show that nodes can effectively adapt their individual operation as routers/flooders, achieving performance equivalent to, and in some cases significantly better than, that of network-wide routing or flooding alone.