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

Geographic routing has been introduced in mobile ad hoc networks and sensor networks. Under ideal settings, it has been proven 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. 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 LLNK and LOOP, that are caused by mobility-induced location errors. Based on 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 show noticeable improvement under all mobility models used in our study. Under the settings we examine, our schemes achieve up to 27 percent improvement in packet delivery and 37 percent reduction in network resource wastage, on average without incurring any additional communication or intense computation.