Comparison of broadcasting techniques for mobile ad hoc networks

Network wide broadcasting in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks provides important control and route establishment functionality for a number of unicast and multicast protocols. Considering its wide use as a building block for other network layer protocols, the MANET community needs to standardize a single methodology that efficiently delivers a packet from one node to all other network nodes. Despite a considerable number of proposed broadcasting schemes, no comprehensive comparative analysis has been previously done. This paper provides such analysis by classifying existing broadcasting schemes into categories and simulating a subset of each category, thus supplying a condensed but comprehensive side by side comparison. The simulations are designed to pinpoint, in each category, specific failures to network conditions that are relevant to MANETs, e.g., bandwidth congestion and dynamic topologies. In addition, protocol extensions using adaptive responses to network conditions are proposed, implemented and analyzed for one broadcasting scheme that performs well in the comparative study.