Distance-Based Local Geocasting in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Geocasting uses location information to disseminate messages within a specified geographic area. However, in some applications, it is not feasible for the nodes to be able to determine their location coordinates. In this paper, we propose a novel distanced-based approach for local geocasting to address this problem. In local geocasting, source node is interested in spread messages within a local area around itself. We exploit the relationship between radius of local area and the expected hop count in a multi-hop wireless network with uniformly distributed nodes. We estimate the minimum number of hops required to cover all of the nodes within the given local geocasting area. The hop count is then used as hop limit to restrict flooding. We theoretically analyze the average number of rebroadcast messages in the proposed approach and the analytical model is validated by the statistic results. We further conduct a simulation-based comparison between distance-based local geocasting and traditional local geocasting. The results show that our approach can achieve a similar performance as that of traditional local geocasting.