Spatial aware location service for mobile ad hoc networks

The design of efficient and scalable routing protocols is a fundamental challenge in wireless ad-hoc networks. Compare to topology-based routing protocol, position-based routing is regarded as having better scalability and lower control overhead, since hosts do not need to maintain the routes to their destinations and periodically broadcast the routing control messages. Location service is the most important part of the position-based routing protocol. Before sending packets, the source node needs to obtain the location of the destination node via a location service scheme. With this reliable location information, packets can be sent to the correct target. In this paper we present Spatial Aware Virtual Home Region (SAVHR) - a multi-home region scheme that selects different update and query strategies by using the host´s location as the spatial information. We show that SAVHR shortens the lengths of the update, query and reply paths and also reduces the overall network overhead. The simulation results show that the performance of SAVHR is comparably fast and stable.