A dominating-set-based broadcast gossip protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Traditional gossip-based protocols rely on underlying routing protocols to disseminate messages. In mobile ad hoc networks, frequent topology changes may incur many route errors, which increase the overhead of maintaining routing information. They also need to maintain a partial or global view of the network, which further increases the overhead. This paper presents a broadcast gossip protocol based on dominating set. Neither does it require maintaining any routing information, nor does it need any partial or global view of the network. In this paper, a dominating set is dynamically constructed through an on-demand three-way join session and is kept connected through connect session. A reduce session is also proposed to reduce the size of a dominating set and the calculation only involves the nodes in the dominating set. Simulation results prove that the proposed protocol can achieve high scalability in terms of reliability and transmission delay. © 2008 IEEE.