On the reduction of broadcast redundancy in mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding in mobile ad hoc networks has poor scalability as it leads to serious redundancy, contention and collision. We propose an efficient approach to reduce the broadcast redundancy. In our approach, local topology information and the statistical information about the duplicate broadcasts are utilized to avoid unnecessary rebroadcasts. Simulation is conducted to compare the performance of our approach and flooding. The simulation results demonstrate the advantages of our approach. It can greatly reduce the redundant messages, thus saving much network bandwidth and energy. It can also enhance the reliability of broadcasting. It can be used in static or mobile wireless networks to implement scalable broadcast or multicast communications