IT-SBA: An Improved Timer-based Scalable Broadcast Algorithm for Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Minimizing number of forwarding stations is the prime objective of any broadcast protocol of wireless ad-hoc networks. Although existing proactive protocols show better performance than reactive protocols in minimizing number of forwarding stations but these are non-scalable than reactive protocols because proactive protocols use more network overhead (extended neighbor information) and message overhead (appended forward list) which consume more network resources. Timer mechanism based reactive protocols are more scalable than self-pruning and enhance the network performance but these are not more effective due to probabilistic selection of timer value. In this paper, we propose a reactive broadcast protocol named IT-SBA that uses a deterministic selection of timer value and completes the broadcast by less number of forwarding stations in expense of broadcast delay. Simulation results show that IT-SBA outperforms existing reactive protocols viz. flooding, self-pruning, SBA, E-SBA for both sparse and dense networks.