A K-hop zone-based broadcast protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Most proposed routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) utilize neighbor set information to assist their routing decisions. 1-hop and 2-hop neighbor set information are the cases most commonly used. K-hop neighbor set, where K≥3, is seldom discussed in the literature. We discuss the broadcast problem in MANETs considering the generic K-hop neighbor set. The proposed K-hop zone-based broadcast protocol is a simple, scalable protocol. The main purpose of this study is to provide a generic framework for a broadcast operation with K-hop information and to determine the potential performance improvement by increasing the value K.