Performance evaluation of flooding in MANETs in the presence of multi-broadcast traffic

Broadcasting has many important uses and several Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) protocols assume the availability of an underlying broadcast service. Applications, which make use of broadcasting, include LAN emulation, paging a particular node, However, broadcasting induces what is known as the "broadcast storm problem" which causes severe degradation in network performance, due to excessive redundant retransmission, collision, and contention. Although probabilistic flooding has been one of the earliest suggested approaches to broadcasting. There has not been so far any attempt to analyse its performance behaviour in MANETs. This paper investigates using extensive ns-2 simulations the effects of a number of important parameters in a MANET, including node speed, pause time and, traffic load, on the performance of probabilistic flooding. The results reveal that while these parameters have a critical impact on the reachability achieved by probabilistic flooding, they have relatively a lower effects on the number of saved rebroadcast packets.