Distributed Mobility Transparent Broadcast in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we propose a distributed, mobility transparent broadcast (DMTB) protocol to achieve ef£cient and effective broadcast in mobile ad-hoc networks. The protocol is fully distributed and highly adaptive to node mobility. It does not demand any neighborhood information and incurs little overhead. On one hand, the cross-layer design approach helps achieve effective broadcast with higher ef£ciency and alleviated interference; on the other hand, the proposed protocol achieves network energy balance by randomly rotating the set of relay nodes in different broadcast events even when the network topology stays unchanged. The protocol’s performance is proved to be within a constant of the optimum. Detailed analysis regarding the broadcast interference, node density and protocol overhead is presented. DMTB is not only ef£cient, but also robust against node failures and scalable with the node density or the network area size.