Adaptive approaches to relieving broadcast storms in a wireless multihop mobile ad hoc network

In a multihop mobile ad hoc network, broadcasting is an elementary operation to support many applications. In (Ni et al., 1999), it is shown that naively broadcasting by flooding may cause serious redundancy, contention, and collision in the network, which we refer to as the broadcast storm problem. Several threshold-based schemes are shown to perform better than flooding in (Ni et al., 1999). However, how to choose thresholds also poses a dilemma between reachability and efficiency under different host densities. We propose several adaptive schemes, which can dynamically adjust thresholds based on local connectivity information. Simulation results show that these adaptive schemes can offer better reachability as well as efficiency as compared to the results in (Ni et al., 1999).