Abstract: Because of high mobility of nodes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), there exist frequent link breakages which lead to frequent path failures. This paper, proposes a novel neighbour coverage-based probabilistic rebroadcast protocol for reducing routing overhead in MANETs. In order to effectively exploit the neighbour coverage knowledge, a novel rebroadcast delay is used to determine the rebroadcast order, and then it can obtain the more accurate additional coverage ratio by sensing neighbour coverage knowledge. By combining the additional coverage ratio and connectivity factor, it can set a reasonable rebroadcast probability. This approach combines the advantages of the neighbour coverage knowledge and the probabilistic mechanism, which can decrease the number of retransmissions so as to reduce the routing overhead, and can also improve the routing performance.

Keywords: AdhocNetworks, Neighbour Coverage, Network Connectivity, Probabilistic Rebroadcast, Routing overhead.