Enhancing Location Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Location management in mobile ad hoc networks are mainly motivated by the adoption of geographic routing of packets because of scalability issues. The main location management proposals have, as a common characteristic, two distinct phases: the location query of the position of a destination node and the data transmission toward that node. We propose to send the initial packets of a flow to learn the position of their destination instead of adopting a dedicated query packet. Such approach can be applied to previous schemes in location management. We identify the conditions under which the proposed scheme is worth using in comparison with the traditional one having two distinct phases. An adaptive mechanism is proposed to allow a source to evaluate which scheme is most likely to reduce the overall cost of a given transmission. As our scheme is shown to specially benefit short lived flows, we expect to give a better advantage to the majority of flows. At the longterm, as each cooperative node seeks to adopt the lowest cost scheme for each transmission, we can expect an overall cost reduction of the location management as well as a reduction in the battery consumption. Keywords— Location management, geographic routing, ad hoc networks