Location management for hierarchically organized mobile ad hoc networks

A geography-based grid location service (GLS), proposed elsewhere, has resulted in a scalable location management service for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) where packet forwarding decisions are based on geographic position. A similarly scalable location management strategy has been devised for MANETs that employ hierarchical link state routing. Both approaches employ hierarchical principles to facilitate scalability. However, currently proposed approaches for hierarchical link state routing rely on a designated subset of nodes for location management. Such nodes represent potential sites of hot spot contention. In this paper, it is proposed that by applying the distributed database selection technique of GLS, a hierarchical location management scheme may be realized for MANETs based on link state routing that equitably distributes location server functionality among network nodes. Second, it is shown that location registration overhead per node for hierarchical location management is only logarithmic in the node count.