Store and Flood: A Packet Routing Protocol for Frequently Changing Topology with Ad-Hoc Networks

In ad-hoc networks, packet flooding is used to discover a destination terminal of communication. However, since, in ad-hoc networks, disconnection and reconnection of terminals frequently occur, it often occurs that the destination terminal cannot often be discovered. Moreover, since the route from a source terminal to a destination terminal frequently changes, the route information obtained by packet flooding may become unavailable in a short period of time. In this paper, to solve these problems, we propose the store-and-flood protocol to improve the packet reachability in ad-hoc networks. In this protocol, the source terminal does not flood route request packets to discover destination mobile terminal but blindly floods data packets. Then, terminals which relay the flooded packets store the packets and later flood the packets when new other terminals connect to them. We show the protocol behavior and the packet format of our proposed protocol. Moreover, the performance and the overhead of the proposed protocol are shown by simulation experiments.