Broadcasting is one of the fundamental data dissemination mechanisms in mobile ad hoc network (MANET), which is, for instance, extensively used in many routing protocols for route discovery process. The dynamic topology and limited
communication bandwidth of such networks pose a number of challenges in designing an efficient broadcasting scheme for MANETs. The simplest approach is flooding, where each node retransmit every unique received packet exactly once
on each outgoing link. Although flooding ensures that broadcast packet is received by all network nodes, it generates many redundant transmissions which can trigger high transmission collision and contention in the network, a
phenomenon referred to as the broadcast storm.
Several probabilistic broadcast algorithms have been proposed that incur low communication overhead to mitigate the broadcast storm problem and tend to show superior adaptability in changing environments when compared to
deterministic (i.e., non-probabilistic) schemes. However, most of these schemes reduce redundant broadcasts at the expense of reachability, a requirement for near-global network topological information or support from additional
hardware.
This research argues that broadcast schemes that combine the important features of fixed probabilistic and counter-based schemes can reduce the broadcast storm problem without sacrificing reachability while still achieving
better end-to-end delay. To this end, the first part of this research investigate the effects of forwarding probabilities and counter threshold values on the
performance of fixed probabilistic and counter-based schemes. The findings of this investigation are exploited to suggest a new hybrid approach, the Probabilistic Counter-Based Scheme (PCBS) that uses the number of duplicate
packets received to estimate neighbourhood density and assign a forwarding probability value to restrict the generation of so many redundant broadcast
packets. The simulation results reveal that under various network conditions PCBS reduces the number of redundant transmissions, collision rate and end-to-end delay significantly without sacrificing reachability when compared against counter-based, fixed probabilistic and flood broadcasting.
Often in MANETs, there are regions of different node density due to node mobility. As such, PCBS can suffer from a degree of inflexibility in terms of rebroadcast probability, since each node is assigned the same forwarding
probability regardless of its local neighbourhood conditions. To address this shortcoming, the second part of this dissertation proposes an Adjusted Probabilistic Counter-Based Scheme (APCBS) that dynamically assigns the
forwarding probability to a node based on its local node density using a mathematical function. Thus, a node located in a sparse region of the network is assigned a high forwarding probability while a node located in denser region is assigned a relatively lower forwarding probability. These combined effects enhance end-to-end delay, collision rate and reachability compared to PCBS
variant. The performance of most broadcasting schemes that have been suggested for MANETs including those presented here, have been analysed in the context of “pure” broadcast scenarios with relatively little investigation towards their
performance impact on specific applications such as route discovery process.
The final part of this thesis evaluates the performance of the well-known AODV routing protocol when augmented with APCBS route discovery. Results indicate that the resulting route discovery approach reduces the routing overhead,
collision rate and end-to-end delay without degrading the overall network throughput compared to the existing approaches based on flooding, counterbased and fixed probabilistic route discovery
