Parameterized Neighborhood-based Flooding for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Flooding is a simple routing technique that can be used to transmit data from one node to every other node in a network. The focus of this paper is to investigate improvements to flooding techniques used in ad hoc wireless networks. Recent work has focused on using topological information to reduce the number of broadcasts. The number of broadcasts necessary to flood the network was the major performance metric used to compare previous neighborhood-based flooding algorithms. We build upon this foundation by first presenting a Parameterized Neighborhood-Based Flooding (PNBF) algorithm, which provides a single platform for the performance comparison of various multi-hop neighborhood-based flooding algorithms. We also introduce and motivate the use of additional performance metrics, including total number of collisions and percentage of nodes that receive the message, for comparing flooding algorithms. An analysis is given of how different network properties, such as average node degree, communication patterns, affect the performance of the different neighborhood-based flooding algorithms. Our simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm is capable of handling a wide variety of situations where properties of ad hoc networks along with the relative importance of the performance criteria are taken into consideration.