A Broadcast Engagement ACK Mechanism for Reliable Broadcast Transmission in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

How to safely or reliably flood a packet via broadcast scheme to all nodes in computer networks is an important issue. However, it is a big challenge and critical problem to broadcast data packets over mobile ad hoc networks reliably due to the unsettled wireless links, high mobility, and the lack of the acknowledgment (ACK) scheme. Many solutions deal with this problem by adopting multiple unicast transmissions to achieve reliable broadcast transmission in network layer. Unfortunately, it will cause severe duplicate transmissions and thus rapidly consume the limited network bandwidth. One simplest way to solve this drawback is to broadcast data packets in data link layer. But a serious problem will be arisen that replied ACK frames will collide at the sending node if we enforce each mobile node to reply an ACK after receiving the broadcast data frame. Therefore, in order to overcome the thorny problem, we proposed a broadcast engagement ACK mechanism (BEAM), which is completely compatible with the IEEE 802.11 protocol, for reliable broadcast transmission in the data link layer. We also show that the overhead of raising the reliability of broadcast transmission in network layer would be significantly reduced in data link layer. Simulation results show that the proposed BEAM can reach approximate 100% reliability even in heavy traffic load. We also indicate that the BEAM could be combined with other network layer broadcast schemes to approach higher flooding ratio as well as reduce bandwidth consumption effectively. key words: ad hoc, broadcast, network, MAC, reliability, wireless