Congestion and Network Density Adaptive Broadcasting in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Flooding is an obligatory technique to broadcast messages within mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Simple flooding mechanisms cause the broadcast storm problem and swamp the network with a high number of unnecessary retransmissions, thus resulting in increased packet collisions and contention. This degrades the network performance enormously. There are several broadcasting schemes that adapt to different network conditions of node density, congestion and mobility. A comprehensive simulation based analysis of the effects of different network conditions on the performance of popular broadcasting schemes can provide an insight to improve their performance by adapting to different network conditions. This paper attempts to provide a simulation based analysis of some widely used broadcasting schemes. In addition, we have proposed two adaptive extensions to a popular protocol known as Scalable Broadcasting Algorithm (SBA) which improve its performance in highly congestive and sparser network scenarios. Simulations of these extensions have shown an excellent reduction in broadcast latency and broadcast cost while improving reachability.