Efficient Broadcasting in MANETs by Selective Forwarding

A major challenge faced in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is locating devices for communication, especially in the case of high node mobility and sparse node density. Present solutions provided by the ad hoc routing protocols range from flooding the entire network with route requests, to deploying a separate location management scheme to maintain a device location database. Many applications as well as various unicast routing protocols such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP), and Location Aided Routing (LAR) use broadcasting or a derivation of it. Flooding is expensive in terms of overhead and wastes valuable resources such as bandwidth and power. We propose to develop a strategy to reduce the redundant transmission of packets in normal flooding used in broadcasting and we describe strategies for choosing only a minimal set of nodes to re-broadcast in grid networks. Our strategies reduce the redundant transmission of packets, thus packets are forwarded with a minimal number of transmissions. To determine the minimal set of nodes we propose a new algorithm called Efficient Broadcasting by Selective Forwarding (EBSF) that uses a distance-based approach in selecting the nodes among all the nodes in a grid network. The distance-based approach is implemented for broadcast and rebroadcast to a set of nodes with the help of a threshold value that reduces the number of redundant transmission. This threshold value can be tuned to show the performance enhancement.