A Flooding Control Method with Ack-carry for Location-Based Information Dissemination in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Flooding is one of the most fundamental approaches to deliver information that is likely to be of interest to surrounding mobile nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. A number of research groups have proposed flooding protocols on purpose to reduce the redundant retransmissions from neighboring nodes. In those approaches, unnecessary transmissions are not minimized in an area where no nodes are interested in the information. In this paper, we propose a flooding method that suppresses transmissions of information to unnecessary nodes in mobile ad hoc networks with some fixed nodes. In the proposed method, when a mobile node passes near the source node of the received information, it sends an acknowledgement (ACK) including the addresses of fixed nodes that relayed the information. Then, the source node attaches those addresses to the information in later transmissions, and the fixed nodes whose addresses are specified in the information expand the flooding area. By doing so, the source node can effectively deliver the information to mobile nodes which are likely to pass near the source node. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method through some simulations.