An Efficient Reliable Broadcasting Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Reliable broadcast is an important operation in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) (e.g., giving orders, searching routes, and notifying important signals). However, using a naive flooding to achieve reliable broadcasting may be very costly, causing a lot of contention, collision, and congestion, to which we refer as the broadcast storm problem [1]. This paper proposes an efficient reliable broadcasting protocol by taking care of the potential broadcast storm problem that could occur in the medium-access level. Existing protocols are either unreliable [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], or reliable [7, 8] but based on a too costly approach. Our protocol differs from existing protocols by ensuring reliability but adopting a low-cost unreliable broadcast as a basic operation. Simulation results do justify the efficiency of the proposed protocol.