Received signal based minimization of broadcast storm in multi-hop MANET

The absence of guaranteed static reference nodes in a dynamic MANET environment makes it almost impossible to control the propagation of a broadcast packet in a controlled fashion. Therefore, to offset the well documented inefficiencies of a simple flooding mechanism, we propose optimal reliability broadcast mechanism (ORBM). ORBM is a received signal strength based scheme to control temporal congestion (arising out of broadcast storms) and reducing rebroadcast redundancy. Our main focus has been the prioritization of retransmissions from nodes which cover maximum virgin territory. Moreover, ORBM is topology adaptive, in the sense that there is higher rebroadcast suppression in a dense neighborhood than in a sparse one. Our simulations show that ORBM is highly scalable and practically immune to neighbor density as well as mobility. The strength of ORBM lies in the cost of a flood growing linearly with the network diameter