Efficient flooding scheme based on regular polygonal tiling in wireless ad hoc networks

Flooding in wireless ad hoc networks is one of the most fundamental operations to propagate control messages in entire network. The traditional flooding scheme generates excessive packet retransmissions, resource contention, and collisions since every node forwards the packet at least once. Recently, several flooding schemes have been proposed to avoid these problems; however, these unnecessary forwarding nodes still remain in these flooding schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel flooding scheme to efficiently minimize the number of forwarding nodes by employing a regular polygonal tiling method. Using location information of I-hop neighbor nodes, our proposed scheme selects nodes which are located closest to vertices of regular polygons as forwarding nodes. We also provide an ideal model to minimize the number of forwarding nodes and prove that our scheme approached the ideal model through a detailed analysis. Simulation results show that the performance of our scheme outperforms recent noteworthy flooding schemes in terms of the number of forwarding nodes, number of collisions, and the delivery ratio.