Performance Comparison of Broadcasting methods in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous system of mobile nodes with routing capabilities connected by wireless links, the union of which forms a communication network modeled in the form of an arbitrary graph. The vision of Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is wireless internet, where users can move anywhere anytime and still remaining connected with the rest of the world. The main challenges in MANET are reliability, bandwidth and battery power. The network has unpredictable characteristics such as its topology, signal strengths fluctuates with environment and time, communication routes breaks and new ones are formed dynamically. In this context, communication algorithms and protocols should have very light in computational and storage needs in order to conserve energy and bandwidth. Broadcasting is the process in which a source node sends a message to all other nodes in MANET. Network wide broadcasting in Mobile Ad Hoc Network provides important control and route establishment functionality for a number of unicast and multicast protocols. Broadcasting in MANET poses more challenges than in wired networks due to node mobility and scarce system resources. Broadcasting a packet to the entire network is a basic operation and has extensive applications in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This paper presents an overview of the broadcasting techniques in mobile ad hoc networks, and simulating the simple Flooding algorithm and Probability based flooding algorithm using NS2 simulation.