Comparison of Broadcasting Techniques for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Network wide broadcasting in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks provides important control and route establishment functionality for a number of unicast and multicast protocols. Considering its wide use as a building block for other network layer protocols, the MANET community needs to standardize a single methodology that efficiently delivers a packet from one node to all other network nodes. Despite a considerable number of proposed broadcasting schemes, no comprehensive comparative analysis has been previously done. This paper provides such analysis by classifying existing broadcasting schemes into categories and simulating a subset of each category, thus supplying a condensed but comprehensive side by side comparison.