The effect of mobility-induced location errors on geographic routing in ad hoc networks: analysis and improvement using mobility prediction

Geographic routing in mobile ad hoc networks has proved to provide drastic performance improvement over strictly address-centric routing schemes. While geographic routing has been shown to be correct and efficient when location information is accurate, its performance in the face of location errors is not well understood. In this paper, we study the effect of inaccurate location information caused by node mobility under a rich set of scenarios and mobility models. We identify two main problems, named LINK and LOOP, that are caused by mobility-induced location errors. Based on the analysis via ns-2 simulations, we propose two mobility prediction schemes - neighbor location prediction (NLP) and destination location prediction (DLP) to mitigate these problems. Simulation results have shown noticeable improvement under all mobility models used in our study. Our schemes achieve up to 27% improvement in packet delivery and 37% reduction in network resource wastage on average without incurring any additional communication or intense computation.