A distributed and efficient flooding scheme using 1-hop information in mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding is one of the most fundamental operations in mobile ad hoc networks. Traditional implementation of flooding suffers from the problems of excessive redundancy of messages, resource contention, and signal collision. This causes high protocol overhead and interference with the existing traffic in the networks. Some efficient flooding algorithms were proposed to avoid these problems. However, these algorithms either perform poorly in reducing redundant transmissions or require each node to maintain 2-hop (or more) neighbors information. In the paper, we study the sufficient and necessary condition of 100 percent deliverability for flooding schemes that are based on only 1-hop neighbors information. We further propose an efficient flooding algorithm that achieves the local optimality in two senses: 1) The number of forwarding nodes in each step is minimal and 2) the time complexity for computing forwarding nodes is the lowest, which is O(nlogn), where n is the number of neighbors of a node. Extensive simulations have been conducted and simulation results have shown the excellent performance of our algorithm. © 2007 IEEE.