As the technology of
mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) develops, many new kinds of applications in
this field emerge. The group-oriented services which take
advantage of the broadcasting nature of wireless networks are of much
importance. Therefore, broadcasting/multicasting protocols in MANETs are
receiving increased attention. Energy efficiency is a critical issue in MANETs
and sensor networks where power of nodes is limited and difficult to recharge.
This issue is crucial in the design of new routing protocols since each node
acts not only as a host but also as a router. This project gives a general
survey of broadcast/multicast routing protocols, network
coding approaches and energy-efficient broadcast/multicast routing
protocols in MANETs. In order to maximize network lifetime, we propose a new
energy-efficient broadcast protocol, called EBOLSR, which adapts the EOLSR protocol
to the broadcasting domain. And then we compare the
performance of EBOLSR with three other broadcast protocols in two distinct
MANET scenarios, Classical Flooding, Simplified Multicast Forwarding (SMF), and
a coding-based broadcast protocol (CodeBCast).
Simulation results show that EBOLSR protocol has less energy consumption and
longer network lifetime than Classical Flooding, and also
explain the reason why it does not outperform SMF in terms of the energy
consumption and network lifetime.