Enhanced distance based broadcasting protocol with reduced energy consumption

One important challenge for broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks is the well known broadcast storm problem. Most of existing techniques to prevent it usually lies in reducing the number of forwarding nodes in the process. One of these algorithms (from the state of the art) is the distance based broadcasting algorithm, that tries to minimize this number considering only as candidates of forwarding those nodes far from the source. In this paper, we propose a cross layer design for enhancing the distance based broadcasting protocol in terms of energy consumption. Instead of using the distance, we are considering the reception signal strength. That is more realistic since the theoretical transmission range is not accurate in environments with obstacles. The necessary transmission power to reach an intended device is obtained using the beacons. If the furthest node can be reached using less power than the default value, the transmission power is reduced and thus, we save energy. Different proposals for enhancing the algorithm are proposed, and they not only save energy but also highly reduce the number of collisions.