A Simulation Study of Probabilistic Broadcast in MANETs

Abstract

Probabilistic flooding schemes use probabilities to help a node decide whether it rebroadcasts its transiting packet or not. Even though probabilistic schemes have been around for a while, only a few research attempts have analyzed the performance behavior in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) environment. Our present study investigates the effects of mobility, injected traffic load and network density on the performance of probabilistic flooding in MANETs. In order to reach our goal, we have implemented probabilistic flooding in the widely used ns-3 discrete-event simulator. After extensive testing through our ns-3 simulator the collected statistics have revealed that the performance metrics including reachability and saved rebroadcast are heavily affected by the injected traffic load and node mobility. Moreover, our performance results have revealed that increasing network mobility results in a decreasing reachability and a high saved rebroadcast.