Flooding in 3-dimensional mobile ad hoc networks using 1-hop information

Flooding is a fundamental problem in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In traditional pure flooding, a node retransmits a flooding message to all its neighbours when it firstly receives the message. The pure flooding suffers from excessive redundancy of transmissions, which causes high overhead and severe interference of the network. Therefore, many flooding algorithms have been proposed to reduce the redundancy of messages. However, former works mostly focus on 2-dimensional MANETs, and their approaches are hard to be extended to 3-dimensional wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the flooding problem for 3-dimensional MANETs. We propose an efficient flooding algorithm using only 1-hop neighbours information to optimise running time of the algorithm. Under the premise of ensuring full delivery, the proposed algorithm selects a minimum set of neighbours for each node to forward messages for reducing redundant transmissions. Simulations have been conducted and the results have shown that the proposed algorithm significantly decreases required transmissions for a flooding.