A location aided flooding protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

Flooding in wireless ad hoc networks is a fundamental and critical operation in supporting various applications and protocols. However, the traditional flooding scheme generates excessive redundant packet retransmissions, causing contention, packet collisions and ultimately wasting precious limited bandwidth and energy. In this paper, we propose an efficient flooding protocol called vertex forwarding, which minimizes the flooding traffic by leveraging location information of 1-hop neighbor nodes. Our scheme works as if there were existing a hexagonal grid in the network field to guide the flooding procedure, only the vertex nodes which are located at or nearest to the vertices of the grid should be nominated to forward the message. We also provide a distributed algorithm for finding the vertex nodes. Simulation results show that our scheme is so efficient that it is almost able to reduce the number of forward nodes to the lower bound. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.