Controlled flooding in disconnected sparse mobile networks

The incredible growth in the capabilities and functionality of mobile devices has enabled new applications and network architectures to emerge. Due to the potential for node mobility, along with significant node heterogeneity, characteristics such as very large delays, intermittent links, and high link error rates pose a new set of network challenges. Along with these challenges, end-to-end paths are assumed not to exist and message relay approaches are often adopted. While message flooding is a simple and robust solution for such cases, its cost in terms of network resource consumption is unaffordable. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of different controlled message flooding schemes over disconnected sparse mobile networks. We study the effect of these schemes on message delay, network resource consumption, and neighbor discovery overhead. Our simulations show that our schemes can save substantial network resources while incurring a negligible increase in the message delivery delay. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.