Abstract:  

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a reliable system formed by co-operating and independent nodes that connect and communicate with each other wirelessly without pre-existing infrastructure. In such a network, the easiest way to broadcast the packets to all network nodes is flooding. However, flooding leads to serious drawbacks such as collision, contention and redundant retransmission. These drawbacks are known as the broadcast storm problem. This research proposes an adaptive algorithm in order to decrease the overall network overhead and minimize the problems associated to flooding. Moreover this research concentrates on studying the effect of using different mobility models that provide general idea about nodes movement, status and locations. In particular the performance of Random Waypoint and File mobility models in terms of their effect on network communication is evaluated. Moreover, this research provides performance evaluation of different traffic types such as Constant Bit Rate (CBR) and Traffic GEN. Results from Qualnet simulations have revealed that the new proposed algorithm outperforms flooding in terms of different metrics: reducing end-to-end delay in addition to minimizing the normalized routing load and maximizing the packets delivery ratio, in addition to concluding that Traffic GEN outperforms the CBR in terms of throughput. Moreover the CBR traffic has higher delay values than Traffic GEN