Title: A dynamic probabilistic route discovery for mobile ad hoc networks

Authors: Jamal-Deen Abdulai, Mohamed Ould-Khaoua, Lewis M. Mackenzie, Aminu Mohammed

Addresses: Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RZ, UK. ' Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, AL-Khodh 123, Muscat, Oman. ' Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RZ, UK. ' Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RZ, UK

Abstract: Blind flooding has been extensively used in ad hoc routing protocols for on-demand route discovery, where a mobile node blindly rebroadcasts received route request (RREQ) packets until a route to a particular destination is established. This can potentially lead to high channel contention, causing redundant retransmissions and thus, excessive packet collisions in the network. Such a phenomenon induces what is known as the broadcast storm problem, which has been shown to greatly increase the network communication overhead and end-to-end delay. In this paper, we show that the deleterious impact of such a problem can be considerably reduced if measures are taken during the dissemination of RREQ packets. We propose a generic probabilistic method for route discovery that dynamically computes the forwarding probability at a given node and can significantly reduce the overhead associated with the dissemination of RREQs. Our analysis reveals that equipping a routing protocol with the proposed probabilistic route discovery can result in a significant reduction of routing control overhead while achieving good throughput.

Keywords: blind flooding; forwarding probability; mobile ad hoc networks; MANETs; reactive routing; routing overhead; simulation; broadcast storm; route discovery; rebroadcasts received route requests; RREQ; routing protocols.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2010.029740

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2010 Vol.4 No.1, pp.108 - 130

Published online: 01 Dec 2009 *

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