Performance evaluation with different mobility models for dynamic probabilistic flooding in MANETs

Broadcasting is an essential and effective data propagation mechanism, with several of important applications such as route discovery, address resolution, as well as many other network services. As data broadcasting has many advantages, also causing a lot of contention, collision, and congestion, which induces what is known as “broadcast storm problems”. Broadcasting has traditionally been based on the flooding protocol, which simply overflows the network with high number of rebroadcast messages until the messages reach to all network nodes. A good probabilistic broadcasting protocol can achieve higher saved rebroadcast, low collisions and less number of relays. In this paper, we propose a dynamic probabilistic approach that dynamically fine-tunes the rebroadcasting probability according to the number of neighbour’s nodes distributed in the ad hoc network for routing request packets (RREQs). The performance of the proposed approach is investigated and compared with the simple AODVand fixed probabilistic schemes using the GloMoSim network simulator under different mobility models. The performance results reveal that the improved approach is able to achieve higher saved rebroadcast and low collision as well as low number of relays than the fixed probabilistic scheme and simple AODV.