Improvement to efficient counter-based broadcast scheme through random assessment delay adaptation for MANETs

Flooding, the process in which each node retransmits every uniquely received packet exactly once is the simplest and most commonly used mechanism for broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Despite its simplicity, it can result in high redundant retransmission, contention and collision, a phenomenon collectively referred to as broadcast storm problem. To mitigate this problem, several broadcast schemes have been proposed which are commonly divided into two categories; deterministic schemes and probabilistic schemes. Probabilistic methods are quite promising because they can reduce the number of redundant rebroadcast without any control overhead. In this paper, we investigate the performance of our earlier proposed efficient counter-based broadcast scheme by adapting its random assessment delay (RAD) mechanism to network congestion. Simulation results revealed that this simple adaptation achieves superior performance in terms of saved rebroadcast, end-to-end delay and reachability.