Distance and Energy-Balance based Reliable Broadcast in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is the most common operation of data transmission in mobile Ad Hoc networks. The conventional blind flooding algorithm incurs the broadcast storm problem. Moreover, energy is critical for the life and the performance of Ad Hoc networks. In order to alleviate the broadcast storm, balance the node energy in network and provide broadcast reliability, a reliable broadcasting algorithm based on the distance and the energy balance is proposed in this paper. In this algorithm, a node determines the distance to the immediate previous neighbor node by obtaining the information of neighbor node from the received data packets. Then a node will schedule the forwarding in a time-division manner according to its forwarding priority which is determined by the distance to the immediate previous node and its own residual energy. To provide reliable broadcast, the algorithm also adopts retransmission mechanism utilizing broadcast packets to acknowledge those packets correctly received instead of acknowledgement packets such as ACK. Simulation results show that this algorithm achieves high arrival rate and lower latency. Meanwhile, it can balance energy consumption of the nodes in a network and prolong the network lifetime.