A limited flooding scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Broadcasting is an elementary operation to support many applications in a mobile ad hoc network. However, naively broadcasting by flooding may cause serious redundancy, contention, and collision in the network, which we refer to as the broadcast storm problem. In this paper we propose a limited flooding scheme which takes the advantage of the cluster structure and which only requires clusterheads, initial nodes and selected gateways to forward the broadcast packets. Our approach reduces control overhead of ad hoc routing protocols significantly and introduces many benefits, including efficient flooding, density adaptation and mobility adaptation. As a result, our approach enables routing scheme in a dense and high mobility mobile ad hoc networks. Simulation shows that our approach outperforms conventional AODV in the dense network, and overmatches some existing cluster schemes such as lowest-ID or highest-connectivity cluster algorithm in the aspect of mobility adaptability.