DAPF: An Efficient Flooding Algorithm for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Flooding algorithm is one of the most important fundamental operations for routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks. Since flooding algorithm generates many redundant messages, it is usually very costly that leads to consume scarce resources such as bandwidth and battery powers in mobile ad hoc networks. It also causes a problem known as the broadcast storm. Many schemes are proposed to improve the performance of flooding algorithm that are mainly classified into two basic approaches: overlay based and local knowledge based approaches, which the second one is more considered. The existing schemes either increase the latency or decrease the reachability of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to improve the performance of flooding algorithm. The basis of the new method is the probabilistic rebroadcasting based on local observations. In this method, the rebroadcast probability of each node is a function of time and local observations. Simulation results show that the new scheme achieves better performance in terms of overhead and latency than similar existing schemes while maintaining the reachability.