Efficient Flooding in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Flooding is one of the most fundamental operations in mobile ad hoc networks. Different from broadcast that requires a broadcast rou ing for transmission of large amount data, flooding is the one-off operation whic h is usually used for dissemination of control packets. Most of the major routing proto cols rely on flooding for disseminating route discovery, route maintenance, a nd topology update packets. However, pure flooding in which each node retransmi t the packet once suffers from the problems of excessive redundancy of messages, r esource contention, and signal collision. A lot of efficient flooding schemes have been proposed to avoid these problems. The chapter investigates existing solutio ns n efficient flooding schemes, and classifies these solutions into three categorie s based on the information each node keeps: 1) no need of neighbor information; 2) 1-hop neighbor information; 3) 2-hop or more neighbor information. We focus on the most representative works in each category, and discuss various algorithms, protocols , and techniques which make flooding more efficient. Challenges and future work a e pointed out at the end.