Random Routing

Mobile ad hoc networks usually use various forms of flooding to discover the location and route of a node or to diffuse a given message. Flooding is useful because it finds a good path to a destination or quickly diffuses the message all over the network. With the flooding, however, also comes the problem of propagating many unnecessary messages throughout the network. In this paper, first, we propose a flooding on the arms of hexagon that significantly reduces redundant messages. It is shown that the efficiency of the hexagon flooding reaches about 68% of the upper-bound efficiency of flooding. Secondly, we analyze random routing on the arms of hexagon that uses fewer messages to locate a destination than flooding. Assuming that a node has first-order neighbor knowledge, the average number of messages to locate a destination can be reduced to one-third of flooding. As the order of neighbor knowledge increases, random routing can further reduce unnecessary messages.