Integrated Data Location in Multihop Wireless Networks

Multihop wireless networks are ideal as infrastructures for location-aware network applications, particularly for disaster recovery operations. However, one missing component is an efficient and scalable distributed data location service. Existing approaches impose significant communication overhead on the underlying wireless layer and generally limit the total number of locatable objects in a network. To address this problem, we present the integrated data location protocol (IDLP), which provides scalable location of a large number of objects by integrating compressed summaries of object signatures into the routing layer. We evaluate our approach using extensive simulations in Qualnet, as well as detailed measurements from a deployed AODV-implementation on the UCSB MeshNet testbed. Results show that IDLP maintains low communication overhead while efficiently locating up to a hundred objects per node.