Efficient location-aided flooding scheme initiated by receiver for MANETs

Flooding is a fundamental, critical, and indispensable operation for supporting various applications and protocols in wireless ad hoc networks. The traditional flooding scheme generates excessive redundant packet retransmissions, however, causing contention and packet collisions, and ultimately wasting precious limited bandwidth and energy. Recently, some flooding schemes have been studied to avoid those problems, but these algorithms either perform well in redundant transmissions or require that the node maintain information about neighbors more than one hop away. One of the most efficient approaches is found in the work of Liu et al., which uses only 1-hop neighbor information. The advantage of this scheme is that it achieves local optimality in terms of the number of retransmitting nodes, although it still produces many redundant transmissions. In this paper, we propose an efficient flooding protocol that minimizes flooding traffic by leveraging location information of 1-hop neighbor nodes. Our scheme is receiver-based, which means that each receiver of a flooding message determines whether it should forward the message based on the given retransmission rule. Simulation results show that our scheme is highly efficient. It is able to reduce the number of forward nodes almost to that of the lower bound but maintains a high delivery ratio.