Improving the performance of counter-based broadcast scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding is the simplest and most commonly used mechanism for broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where each node retransmits every uniquely received message exactly once. Despite its simplicity, it can result in high redundancy, contention and collision, a phenomenon referred to as the broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we propose an enhanced counter-based scheme to mitigate this problem by incorporating probability concept into counter-based scheme. We evaluate the performance of our scheme by comparing it with flooding, fixed probability and counter-based scheme. The simulation results reveal that the new scheme achieves superior performance in terms of both saved rebroadcast and end to end delay, and reachability comparable to flooding in medium and dense networks.