A fuzzy-logic control based probabilistic broadcasting technique for mobile ad hoc networks

An ad-hoc network consists of hosts (mobile or static) and each node can directly communicate with its neighbours lying within the nodes transmission range. In a mobile ad hoc network the most common operation is broadcasting. Broadcasting means sending a message from one given node to all the nodes in the network. In MANET, broadcasting results in a network with redundancy, contention, collision which is often called “Broadcast Storm Problem”. There are number of broadcasting schemes that have been developed and the main objective of broadcasting scheme is to avoid the broadcast storm problem and provide better reachability with minimum overheads. Existing probabilistic broadcast schemes have focused on pure broadcast scenarios with investigations on only a single node parameter either node density or node location, which results in their limited performance. In this paper, the probability of broadcast is determined by considering node density, node location and node remaining battery power. The proposed probabilistic broadcasting scheme takes into account three node parameters to generate the probability to rebroadcast. As the probability to rebroadcast is calculated based on the multiple node parameter, there is a need of an optimization technique. The Fuzzy Logic optimization technique has the ability to simultaneously consider multiple criteria and to model human experience in the form of simple rules. The developed Fuzzy Based probabilistic broadcasting scheme reduces redundant rebroadcasting by minimizing the number of rebroadcasting nodes. To evaluate the performance of developed algorithm it has been implemented on Qualnet with fuzzy logic embedded on it.