A dynamic probabilistic route discovery for mobile ad hoc networks. (2nd December 2009)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Abdulai, Jamal-Deen; Ould-Khaoua, Mohamed; Mackenzie, Lewis M.; Mohammed, Aminu
• Is Part Of: International journal of communication networks and distributed systems. Volume 4:Number 1(2010)
• Page Start: 108
• Page End: 130
• Publication Date: 2009-12-02
• Subjects: blind flooding -- forwarding probability -- mobile ad hoc networks -- MANETs -- reactive routing -- routing overhead -- simulation -- broadcast storm -- route discovery -- rebroadcasts received route requests -- RREQ -- routing protocols; Computer networks -- Periodicals; Telecommunication systems -- Periodicals; Electronic data processing -- Distributed processing -- Periodicals; 004.6
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1754-3916

Abstract

Blind flooding has been extensively used in ad hoc routing protocols for on-demand route discovery, where a mobile node blindly rebroadcasts received route request (RREQ) packets until a route to a particular destination is established. This can potentially lead to high channel contention, causing redundant retransmissions and thus, excessive packet collisions in the network. Such a phenomenon induces what is known as the broadcast storm problem, which has been shown to greatly increase the network communication overhead and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we show that the deleterious impact of such a problem can be considerably reduced if measures are taken during the dissemination of RREQ packets. We propose a generic probabilistic method for route discovery that dynamically computes the forwarding probability at a given node and can significantly reduce the overhead associated with the dissemination of RREQs. Our analysis reveals that equipping a routing protocol with the proposed probabilistic route discovery can result in a significant reduction of routing control overhead while achieving good throughput.