Reducing Broadcast Overhead Using Clustering Based Broadcast Mechanism in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Problem statement: Network wide broadcasting is an important function in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), which attempts to deliver packets from a source node to all other nodes in the network. Broadcasting is often very useful for route discovery, naming, addressing and helping multicast operations in all kinds of networks. For designing broadcast protocols for ad hoc networks, one of the primary goal is to reduce the overhead (redundancy, contention and collision) while reaching all the nodes in network. Approach: We had discussed many approaches in network wide broadcasting namely flooding, probability based, area based, network knowledge and cluster based broadcasting methods. The implementations and analysis will be made on Linux using the Network Simulator NS2. Results: In this study, cluster based flooding algorithm had been proposed and its metrics were namely routing load and packet delivery ratio was compared with two common flooding algorithms namely simple flooding and probability based flooding. Conclusion/Recommendations: It was concluded that simple flooding required each node to rebroadcast all packets. Probability based methods used some basic understanding of network topology, assigning a probability to node to rebroadcast. Cluster broadcasting algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks guaranteed to deliver messages from a source node to all nodes of network.