Triangular tiling-based efficient flooding scheme in wireless ad hoc networks

Flooding is an indispensable operation for providing control or routing functionalities to wireless ad hoc networks. The traditional flooding scheme generates excessive packet retransmissions, resource contention, and collisions since every node forwards the packet at least once. Recently, several flooding schemes have been proposed to avoid these problems; however, these flooding schemes still have unnecessary forwarding nodes. In this paper, we present an efficient flooding scheme to minimize the number of forwarding nodes, based on a triangular tiling algorithm. Using location information of 1-hop neighbor nodes, our proposed scheme selects the nodes which are located closest to the vertices of an equilateral triangle which is inscribed in the transmission coverage as forwarding nodes. The most significant feature of our proposed flooding scheme is that it does not require any extra communication overhead other than the exchange of 1-hop HELLO messages. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme is so efficient that it has the capability to reduce the number of forwarding nodes such that it approaches the lower bound, hence, it alleviates contention and collisions in networks.