A new probabilistic Linear Exponential Backoff scheme for MANETs

Broadcasting is an essential operation in Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) environments. It is used in the initial phase of route discovery process in many reactive protocols. Although broadcasting is simple, it causes the well known broadcast storm problem, which is a result of packet redundancy, contention and collision. A probabilistic scheme has been proposed to overcome this problem. This work aims to study the effect of network density and network mobility on probabilistic schemes using different thresholds (fixed, 2p, 3p and 4p) with the Pessimistic Linear Exponential Backoff (PLEB) algorithm and compare the results with the standard MAC. A number of simulation experiments have been conducted to examine the performance of the proposed PLEP under different operating conditions. The simulation results show that in dense networks the normalized routing load, delay and routing packets are high and the PLEB outperforms the standard MAC in terms of delay.