Position-Aware Counter-Based Broadcast for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcast plays an important role in route discovery, source paging and information diffusion for mobile ad hoc networks. Flooding is a simple solution to broadcast, but it may cause high redundancy, contentions and collisions, a phenomenon referred to as broadcast storm. Counter-based and position-based solutions can avoid blind flooding to some extent. However, the uniformity aroused by constant threshold value and unconcern of the neighbour topology in both schemes causes a low performance efficiency. In this paper, we propose PCB (Position-aware Counter-based Broadcast), an algorithm that integrates the merits of counter-based and position-based schemes. Within PCB, threshold values of expected additional coverage and counters vary adaptively according to network density. We carry out a full-scale simulation study on the NS2 simulator. In comparison with single solution, position-based or counter-based, it is shown that PCB has a better performance.