On the effect of Mobility and Density on Probabilistic Flooding in MANETs

Broadcasting is a fundamental and effective data dissemination mechanism, which has several applications such as route discovery, address resolution, as well as many other network services. While data broadcasting has many advantages, it induces some difficulties known as broadcast storm problems, which are natural consequences of redundant retransmission, collision, and contention. Data broadcasting has traditionally been based on the flooding protocol, which floods the network with high number of packet rebroadcasts until the desired routs are discovered [6]. Density is the number of network nodes per unit area for a given transmission range. This paper investigates the effect of density with different speeds on the behaviour of probabilistic flooding in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This investigation is conducted through extensive simulation on a network of size 25 to 100 nodes. The obtained results reveal that the effect of density with different speeds has a critical impact on the levels of rebroadcast and reachability achieved by probabilistic flooding.