Relative Degree Adaptive Flooding Broadcast Algorithm for Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting has been widely used in mobile Ad hoc networks as a communication means to disseminate information to all reachable nodes. Because radio signals are likely to overlap with others in a geographical area, straightforward broadcasting by flooding becomes very costly and results in serious redundancy, contention and collision, to which we refer as the broadcast storm problem. In this paper we propose the Relative Degree Adaptive flooding Broadcast (RDAB) algorithm for Ad hoc networks to efficiently reduce the broadcast overhead in the network. Based on the current situation of the network and the degree of the nodes, RDAB calculates the relative degree of the nodes, decides which nodes need to re-transmit and which nodes only need to receive. The higher the neighbor node's relative degree, the more uncovered nodes it can cover, hence these nodes can be selected to re-transmit broadcasting packets in the networks. We analyze the reliability and the validity of the RDAB algorithm to prove that the RDAB algorithm is a valid flooding broadcast algorithm. Simulation results show that the RDAB strategy outperforms the Ordinary Flooding Broadcast Method (OBM) and the Multipoint Relaying (MPR) protocol for Ad hoc networks.