A border-aware broadcast scheme for wireless ad hoc network

Under many circumstances, broadcasting is the only way of service discovery, device paging, and even data transfer in wireless ad hoc networks. However, broadcasting may lead to "broadcast storm" problems if it is done by simple flooding in a single common channel. The problems include redundant rebroadcast (overlaying), contention and collision. When the network density is high or the network is getting congested, the problems become severe and may directly lead to degraded performance of the network. We propose a novel broadcast scheme that is simple, highly efficient and scalable. Most importantly, it is a fully distributed scheme which introduces no control overheads (in terms of control traffic), and can adapt to network movement at no extra cost. We evaluate our scheme by OPNET simulation and compare it with existing methods.