Efficient broadcast in MANET using trust mechanisms

Broadcasting is the fundamental operation of mobile ad hoc network, in which a source node transmits the packets that is disseminated to all the nodes in the network. Broadcasting is used in mobile ad hoc network either to broadcast control packets during route discovery or to broadcast the data packets. The simplest method used for broadcast is flooding that degenerates the performance of MANET due to packets collision, contention, and redundancy. This results in the wastage of limited network bandwidth. This paper proposes an efficient approach to broadcast with reduced redundancy and improved performance. The proposed approach is based on the determination of trust between the communicating nodes called as intimacy factor (IF). The IF is calculated for the entire route by the nodes, which is updated. The IF determines whether the packet is to be broadcast or not. The proposed approach reduces the control packet overhead by 40% without compromising the packet delivery ratio and maintaining it above 90%. It also reduces the end-to-end delay of the packets up to 60% and thus leads to the increase in average throughput.