SOLONet: sub-optimal location-aided overlay network for MANETs

Overlay networks have made it easy to implement multicast functionality in wireless ad hoc networks. Their flexibility to adapt to different environments has helped in their steady growth. In MANET, the position of nodes constantly changes; as a result, overlay multicast trees that are built using location information to account for node movement would certainly have a low latency. However, the performance gains of such a tree are offset by the overhead involved in maintaining precise location information. As the degree of (location) accuracy increases, the performance improves but the overhead required to store and broadcast this information also increases. In this paper, we present SOLONet, a design to build a sub-optimal location aided overlay multicast tree, where location updates of each member node are event based. Our simulation results indicate that such a sub-optimal tree does not compromise the performance gains of a location aided overlay multicast tree.