Limited flooding protocol for mobile ad hoc networks : research article

Mobile ad hoc networks are collections of mobile nodes without any fixed infrastructure or central co-ordinating mechanism for packet routing. Consequently, routing is a challenge. In this paper we propose a multipath routing protocol called Limited Flooding. The protocol is fully reactive and does not entail the computation of routing tables. It uses the basic features of flooding but restricts packet propagation by selecting a limited number of links. Discrete-event simulation is used to model ad hoc networks, and the performance of several variations of the protocol is evaluated. The simulation results show that Limited Flooding has better performance than pure flooding and is suitable for networks with unpredictable topological changes and highly mobile nodes.