Abstract
Broadcasting is a common operation in a network to resolve
many issues. In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) in particular,
due to host mobility, such operations are expected
to be executed more frequently (such as finding a route to
a particular host, paging a particular host, and sending an
alarm signal). Because radio signals are likely to overlap
with others in a geographical area, a straightforward broadcasting
by flooding is usually very costly and will result in
serious redundancy, contention, and collision, to which we
refer as the broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we identify
this problem by showing how serious it is through analyses
and simulations. We propose several schemes to reduce
redundant rebroadcasts and differentiate timing of rebroadcasts
to alleviate this problem. Simulation results are presented,
which show different levels of improvement over the
basic flooding approach.
Keywords: broadcast, communication, mobile ad hoc network
(MANET), mobile computing, wireless network.