Hop Count Distance in Flooding-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks With High Node Density

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of flooding-based packet forwarding in a densely populated mobile ad hoc network. Specifically, we develop the probability distribution of hop count distance for a source–destination pair in the network, given that all nodes are roaming. The behavior of packet forwarding in such an environment is analogous to the ripples radiating from the source when one drops a stone into a pond. Due to node mobility, the number of hops traversed by each packet is not simply equal to the number of ripples from source to destination. In this paper, node mobility is represented as a growing circle centered at the destination node. The moving behavior of intermediate nodes can be ignored in a flooding-based ad hoc network with high node density since there is always a node available in the transmission direction to forward packets. The analytical model is validated via simulations. We further demonstrate that based on the proposed analytical model, one can estimate the flooding cost and search latency of target location discovery commonly used in most existing on-demand ad hoc routing protocols, and learn the impact of different flooding schemes on target discovery.