Reducing the energy consumption caused by flooding messages in mobile ad hoc networks

The message flooding method is an important and useful operation for several applications. However, if a network has a large number of mobile nodes and these nodes use the flood operation often, a mobile node's scarce battery energy will be quickly consumed due to flooding too many messages. In this paper, we propose an approach to reducing the energy consumption caused by flooding messages. The energy saving is achieved by (1) merging several small flood messages into a larger one, and (2) limiting the scope of a flood message. Our simulation results show that, at the cost of an increased message forwarding delay, the proposed approach can substantially reduce flood messages' energy consumption without increasing their delivery failure rates.