A smart broadcast scheme for wireless military networks

Many military networks belong to the scope of mobile ad hoc network (MANET). In these networks, broadcasting is a primary and widely-used communication approach. However, it may lead to severe broadcast storm problem in a shared common channel when used inappropriately. The results of the problem include redundant rebroadcast, contention, collision, extra power consumption, network congestion and etc. Therefore, it is considered a critical problem in the resource-constraint ad hoc networks. This paper proposes a smart broadcast scheme, which is simple, highly efficient and scalable. Most importantly, it is fully distributed and hence requires no global information. It introduces no control overheads and is able to adapt to network density and node movement. The performance of the smart algorithm is examined by OPNET simulation and compared with other existing methods.