Efficient receiver-based flooding in mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding is one of the most important operations in mobile ad hoc networks . There are two strategies for existing flooding algorithms to make the forwarding decision. The first strategy is sender-based, where a forwarding node is in charge of determining its next-hop forwarding nodes. Existing sender-based algorithms can achieve linear computation overhead for each node, but this is at the expense of the transmission redundancy. The second strategy is receiver-based, where a node makes the forwarding decision of itself when it receives the flooding message. Receiver-based flooding algorithms perform well on reducing redundancy of transmissions, but each node requires at least O(n^2) computations, where n is its number of neighbors. In this paper, we show that a receiver-based algorithm can achieve both good performance and low computation overhead at the same time. We first introduce an efficient O ( nlogn ) algorithm, RBF. Second, two extensions of RBF, RBF-E1 and RBF-E2, were proposed. RBF-E1 has outstanding performance (1) in 3D wireless networks, and (2) when the defer time is short. RBF-E2 further reduces the computation overhead for each node to O ( n ). The proposed algorithms require only one-hop neighbor location information to make the forwarding decision. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of our algorithms.