Simple algorithm for solving broadcast storm in mobile ad hoc network

In recent years, mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has gained a lot of attention because of its self-organising and infrastructure-free characteristics. Unlike the traditional wireless networks, each node in MANET can act as a router to receive and forward packets. All nodes can randomly move around, leave the network or switch off. Hence, broadcasting has been widely used in diffusing data, routing or topology information in MANET. Unfortunately, MANET may be filled with a large number of redundant broadcasting packets. Furthermore, in order to transmit the broadcasting packets, each mobile node (MN) competes for the limited radio channels. Thus, packet collision is serious. All of these aforementioned conditions are called the 'Broadcast Storm Problem'. Not only does it occupy the network bandwidth but it also consumes the battery of MNs. In this study, the authors propose an algorithm that is different from previous works to solve the Broadcast Storm Problem. The algorithm is suitable for a dynamic MANET environment.