Efficient flooding in ad hoc networks: a comparative performance study

The blind flooding can become very inefficient because of redundant, "superfluous" forwarding. In fact, superfluous flooding increases link overhead and wireless medium congestion. In a large network, with heavy load, this extra overhead can have severe impact on performance and should be eliminated. Efficient flooding schemes to choose a dominant set of nodes have been recently proposed in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we compare the performance of a set of representative schemes via simulation using as criteria the flooding efficiency and the delivery ratio.