IPBM: an energy efficient reliable interference-aware periodic broadcast messaging protocol for MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have been widely employed in many fields including critical information delivery in open terrains as in tactical area, vehicular or disaster area network scenarios. To provide effective network maintenance for those MANETs, it is essential to adopt proper control communication methods, which provide reliable delivery of network information. However, it is difficult to provide control communication that meets the quality of service requirements due to the broadcasting of control messages and dynamic nature of MANETs. Interference is one of the major problems that degrades this service quality, especially for the networks deployed in open terrain environments. Moreover, large and dense MANET scenarios further complicate this problem. Even though many communication methods have been proposed in the literature, a satisfactory one for periodic and broadcast delivery of control packets considering the interference awareness and at the same time yielding high reliability, goodput, energy efficiency still does not exist for MANETs. To that end, we present a new control communication protocol, which is referred to as the Interference-Aware Periodic Broadcast Messaging (IPBM) protocol, for those MANETs deployed in interference-rich open terrains. We show that the proposed interference awareness mechanism of IPBM, in which the transmission power of the units is increased at certain periods, significantly reduces the packet loss caused by the interference problem. Moreover, IPBM achieves an important amount of increase in the link reliability as well as in goodput with the least power consumption among the evaluated solutions. The mobility support feature of IPBM makes the protocol applicable not only to large and dense but also to highly dynamic MANETs. Besides, IPBM can properly work alongside the deployed main data communication protocol, since it provides valuable network information to be manipulated. Simulation results under both static and dynamic topologies confirm that adopting the IPBM protocol in the intended MANET scenarios significantly increases the reliability and goodput as well as the energy efficiency.