Impact of noise and interference on probabilistic broadcast schemes in mobile ad-hoc networks

Broadcasting is a vital part of on-demand routing protocols to discover new routes in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET). Pure flooding is the earliest and still widely used mechanism of broadcasting for route discovery in on-demand routing protocol. In pure flooding, a source node broadcasts a route request to its neighbors. These neighbors then rebroadcast the received route request to their neighbors until the route request arrives at the destination node. Pure flooding may generate excessive redundant traffic leading to increased contention and collisions deteriorating the performance. To limit the redundant traffic, a number of probabilistic broadcast schemes have been proposed in the literature. However, the performance of those probabilistic broadcasting schemes is questionable under real life MANETs which are noisy in nature. Environmental factors like thermal noise and co-channel interference may have adverse effects on the system performance. This paper investigates the effects of thermal noise and co-channel interference on the performance of probabilistic schemes employed in the route discovery mechanism in MANETs. Based on extensive ns-2 simulations, this paper discovers that, contrary to the findings of previous studies, these schemes do not outperform pure flooding scheme when thermal noise and co-channel interference are taken into account.