Efficient flooding for wireless ad hoc networks with directional antennas

In wireless ad hoc networks, the flooding operation is an important utility function. To solve the broadcast storm problem, some efficient flooding schemes have been proposed. However, there also exist many problems in these schemes, such as signal collision. In this paper, we propose an efficient flooding algorithm called EFDA based on the algorithm proposed in [1] (we reference the algorithm as EF1). Through theoretical analysis, our algorithm doesn't affect the local optimality gained by EF1. We have implemented our algorithm in ns-2 simulator, and the results show that exploiting directional antenna can reduce the number of signal collisions and our algorithm achieves better performance than pure flooding and EF1 due to smaller number of signal collisions.