Performance evaluation of leveled probabilistic broadcasting in MANETs and wireless sensor networks

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) or a wireless sensor network (WSN), a mobile node or sensor node can communicate with nodes outside of its transmission range by employing intermediate nodes as relays. To find a path to a specific destination node, the source node broadcasts route request packets that are forwarded to all other nodes. A simple flooding scheme is employed in AODV, where every node rebroadcasts these route request packets even if some of its neighbors have already received the requests, and thus the rebroadcasts may reach no additional nodes. To avoid such redundant packet relays, the authors propose a routing protocol based on a preassigned probability model. They compare their approach with AODV in terms of numerous metrics, including average number of rebroadcasts, average number of packet collisions, end-to-end delay, and throughput. Both analytical and simulation results show that their approach outperforms the AODV protocol for most cases.