Stopping ongoing broadcasts in large MANETs

Abstract

Broadcast is a communication primitive building block widely used in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) for the exchange of control packets and resource location for upper level services such as routing and management protocols. Flooding is the most simple broadcast algorithm, but it wastes a lot of energy and bandwidth, as flooding leads to many redundant radio transmissions. An optimization to flooding is to contain it, once the resource has been found. In this paper, we compare the impact on the latency and power consumption of four competing approaches for flooding containment. The results show that stopping ongoing broadcasts can achieve promising performance increases over other flooding base techniques, when applied in large scale MANETs with scarce power resources. In addition, results show that both network topology and the number of copies of the resource influence differently the performance of each searching approach.