Efficient flooding in mobile ad hoc networks

Flooding is one of the most fundamental operations in mobile ad hoc networks. Different from broadcast that requires a broadcast routing for transmission of large amount data, flooding is the one-off operation which is usually used for dissemination of control packets. Most of the major routing protocols rely on flooding for disseminating route discovery, route maintenance, and topology update packets. However, pure flooding in which each node retransmits the packet once suffers from the problems of excessive redundancy of messages, resource contention, and signal collision. A lot of efficient flooding schemes have been proposed to avoid these problems. The chapter investigates existing solutions on efficient flooding schemes, and classifies these solutions into three categories based on the information each node keeps: 1) no need of neighbor information; 2) 1-hop neighbor information; 3) 2-hop or more neighbor information. We focus on the most representative works in each category, and discuss various algorithms, protocols, and techniques which make flooding more efficient. Challenges and future work are pointed out at the end.