Contribution of Broadcast Algorithms to Reactive Ad Hoc Routing

Most reactive routing protocols hoc wireless networks rely on a broadcast algorithm known as flooding for route discovery. With flooding, many copies of each message are retransmitted unnecessarily resulting in a sub-optimal resource consumption. Given that mobile devices usually have limited power and computational resources, it is of the utmost importance to reduce the resource consumption of each route discovery. A number of alternatives to flooding have been presented but their impact on the performance of reactive routing protocols is not well understood. This paper compares and discusses the performance of a routing protocol for MANETs with three distinct broadcast algorithms.