On the Behavior of Broadcasting Protocols for MANETs Under Omission Faults Scenarios

Ensuring reliable communication between nodes is a major challenge in mobile ad-hoc networks due to wireless signal propagation that can be significantly affected by terrain, obstacles, battery exhaustion and node mobility. Existing broadcasting protocols for MANETs are able to deal with mobility, as well as congestion and collision, but only when under a fail-stop failure model. However, this model is not a good representative of the real scenarios of faults frequent in MANETs such as link failures, temporary network partitions, topology changes and momentary node failures. In this work we evaluate – through the aid of simulation experiments – how well MANET broadcasting protocols behave when under a more realistic failure model, which are characterized by omission faults. We also discuss their properties and behaviors when taking reliability into consideration. The study conducted here show that most protocols are highly impacted by node failures and are not capable of maintaining high delivery rate. Some even exhibit coverage levels that are unreasonable to expect from broadcasting protocols when placed in a real world scenario.