Leveraging 1-hop neighborhood knowledge for efficient flooding in wireless ad hoc networks

Flooding is a fundamental and frequently invoked operation in wireless ad hoc networks. Existing flooding techniques either are unreliable, generate overwhelming unnecessary retransmission, or incur excessive network control overhead. In this paper, we address these crucial problems and propose a new flooding technique called edge forwarding. The new scheme minimizes the flooding traffic by leveraging location information to limit broadcast retransmission to only hosts near the perimeter of each broadcast coverage. Unlike most existing techniques, edge forwarding requires each host to track only neighboring nodes within its one-hop distance. Therefore, it is more adaptive to host mobility and incurs less network control overhead. In particular, it can be easily incorporated into many existing routing protocols without any additional control overhead. Our performance studies indicate that with our strategy, a substantial portion of the unnecessary broadcast retransmission can be eliminated.