DibA: an adaptive broadcasting scheme in mobile ad hoc networks

Broadcasting is a vital communication mechanism in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, as it is the key element for exchanging control packets to support some services such as management and routing protocols. Simple Flooding, which is mostly used as the broadcasting mechanism, is neither resource efficient nor reliable especially in high populated and dense networks. The Distance-Based (DB) scheme is one of the schemes proposed to alleviate the Flooding effects. However, DB uses a constant pre-determined distance threshold value regardless of network dynamics. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Distance-Based (DibA) scheme, which locally determines the density of the network and adjusts the distance threshold of every rebroadcasting operation without relying on HELLO packets or GPS systems. Our simulation study shows that our proposed scheme achieves considerable performance improvement over DB while the average value of transmission packets is not a function of network size.