Geographic forwarding rules to reduce broadcast redundancy in mobile ad hoc wireless networks

The mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are self-organizing networks. They use the mechanism of broadcasting to discover the links between nodes, to share the topology information, and to maintain the routing tables. However, the broadcasting suffers from redundant retransmissions causing radio resources waste and packet loss, especially in large networks. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized technique, called geographic forwarding rules (GFRs), to reduce the number of broadcast messages in mobile ad hoc networks. We use the location information of nodes to divide the network into virtual zones. Then we try to avoid duplicate retransmissions between the zones. Our proposition reduces the amount of overhead while it achieves a successful dissemination. We focused our research on the optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol, the most known proactive routing protocol in the MANETs. We demonstrate, by simulations, that our geographic forwarding rules keep the number of disseminated topology control (TC) messages less than that of the default forwarding rules (DFRs) of OLSR.