Abstract
Broadcast is an important operation in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Flooding, a straightforward approach, performs the broadcast. Unfortunately, flooding will not only cause problems like redundancy, contention, and collision but may lead to rapid battery exhaustion and reduce the network lifetime. Hence, how to balance remaining battery energy of mobile hosts is a critical issue for the MANETs. Our proposed power-balance broadcast algorithms take the residual battery energy of hosts into consideration. Each host has a rebroadcast probability which is determined by its residual power, number of neighbors, and average residual power of neighbors. Therefore, the hosts with less energy will have lower probability to broadcast than those with more energy. We inhibit low energy hosts from rebroadcasting to balance the host remaining energy and extend the lifetime of the networks. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach can balance the remaining battery energy of hosts and extend network lifetime without scanting the reachability, even in the environment of high mobility and density.