A novel mechanism for flooding based route discovery in ad hoc networks

To avoid the problem of wireless broadcast storm, the Random Rebroadcast Delay (RRD) approach was introduced in the process of flooding-based route discovery in DSR and AODV protocols. We identify the “next-hop racing” phenomena due to the RRD approach and propose a Positional Attribute based Nexthop Determination Approach (PANDA) to address this problem. Based on positional attributes such as the relative distance, estimated link lifetime, transmission power consumption, an intermediate node will identify itself as good or bad candidate for the next-hop node and use different rebroadcast delay accordingly. Through simulations we evaluate the performance of PANDA using path optimality, end-to-end delay, and transmission power consumption. Simulation results show that PANDA can: (a) improve path optimality, and end-to-end delay, (b) help find data paths with only 15%~40% energy consumption compared to the RRD approach.