Improving Probabilistic Route Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Due to high mobility of nodes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), there exist frequent link breakages which lead to nfrequent path failures and route discoveries. The overhead of a route discovery cannot be neglected. In a route discovery, broadcasting is a fundamental and effective data propagation mechanism, where a mobile node blindly rebroadcasts the first received route request packets unless it has a route to the destination, and thus it causes the broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we propose a neighbor coverage-based probabilistic rebroadcast protocol for reducing routing overhead in MANETs. In order to effectively exploit the neighbor coverage knowledge, we propose a novel rebroadcast delay to determine the rebroadcast order, and then we can obtain the more accurate additional coverage ratio by sensing neighbor coverage knowledge. We also define a connectivity factor to provide the node density adaptation. By combining the additional coverage ratio and connectivity factor, we set a reasonable rebroadcast probability. Our approach combines the advantages of the neighbor coverage knowledge and the probabilistic mechanism, which can significantly decrease the number of retransmissions so as to reduce the routing overhead, and can also improve the routing performance.