A Two-Dimensional Logical Coordinate System for Hexagonal Grids in MANETs

Hexagonal grid is a popular and powerful network model in various networks and especially in the mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). To the best of our knowledge, however, there is no suitable coordinate system for the hexagonal grids. So it has been a big challenge to solve the node location problem for hexagonal grids in MANETs. In this paper, we propose an intuitive and simple two-dimensional logical coordinate system for hexagonal grids, and we propose a novel approach that maps the hexagonal grids to traditional rectangular grids based on the proposed coordinate system. Given the two-dimensional coordinate of any node in MANETs, the hexagonal grid where the node resides can be computed by the proposed approach. The location of the hexagon center can be computed easily, which is important for location-based routing protocols in MANETs.