A reliable broadcast/multicast scheme for multihop mobile ad hoc networks

In wired networks, broadcast and multicast transmissions can be easily achieved by data link layer (layer 2). Nevertheless, it is a big challenge to safely transfer broadcast or multicast data frames over multihop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) due to the high bit error rate, the high collision probability and the lack of acknowledgment. Additionally, most of MANET's routing protocols rely on the broadcast function to exchange essential routing packets between mobile nodes and need the multicast function to make more efficient use of network bandwidth for some particular multimedia applications. From our observations, the efficiency of the unicast/multicast routing protocol of finding the path/tree is highly dependent on supported broadcast schemes of the underlying media access control (MAC) protocol. Therefore, in this paper, we illustrate the uncertain broadcast problem due to no replying acknowledgment from any recipients when mobile nodes deliver broadcast frames in wireless networks. We, then, propose a novel reliable broadcast scheme to solve this problem as well as a reliable multicast scheme to enhance the network utilization in data link layer. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme, which is still compatible with IEEE 802.11 standard, can efficiently minimize the bandwidth consumption as well as propagation delay.