Zone-based controlled flooding in mobile ad hoc networks

In MANETs querying routes by blind flooding often incurs redundancy, contention, and collision. These phenomena are known as the broadcast storm problem, which will degrade the network performance. To alleviate the broadcast storm problem, we propose a controlled flooding mechanism, called zone-based controlled flooding (ZCF), to improve the efficiency of rebroadcast in the route discovery phase. To quickly repair a broken link close to the destination node without enlisting the service of the source node, we also propose a one-hop broadcast recovery mechanism to locally repair the broken route, thereby minimizing the routing overhead and reducing the delay time. We employ the GloMoSim network simulator to evaluate the performance of our proposals, used in conjunction with the AODV routing protocol, which we call M-AODV, and compare it with AODV. Results show that M-AODV achieves significant performance improvement over AODV.