Location-aided broadcast in wireless ad hoc networks

Research in mobile ad hoc networks is a challenging field due to the constant changes in network topology. Broadcast service is fundamental in such networks, as it supports a wide range of important applications and dy-namic source routing protocols. The traditional broadcast protocol (i.e., flooding) is known to be inefficient due to the broadcast storm problem, which leads to severe message collisions and channel contention. To alleviate this problem, a number of broadcast protocols are proposed that aim at reducing the number of retransmissions for a broadcast. In this paper, we show that by merely using the immediate (i.e., within a single hop) neighbor’s locations, a mobile host can compute a small subset of neighbors (known as the minimum cover set) for broadcast retransmissions. Based on the concept of the cover set, we then propose three new location-aided broadcast protocols for mobile ad hoc networks that effectively broadcast the message with a very competitive number of retransmissions. We then go on to compare and analyze the simulation results of our protocols against others. The results show that the new broadcast protocols are capable of achieving high reachability with a low number of retransmissions and, overall, outperform other protocols.