Poster Abstract: Sociological Orbit aware Location Approximation and Routing in MANET

In the real world, mobile users routinely move in between and spend a considerable amount of time at a few specific places of social interest. For example, a regular day in the life of a professor may involve routine visits to his/her office, a classroom or a conference room, while spending considerable amount of time in each of these venues. Thus, although it is hard to keep track of an user at all times, we can identify a list of possible places (e.g. office, conference room or classroom), that we refer to as “hub(s)”, for locating the user. In this paper, we study a “macro-level” sociological movement of mobile users and identify a partially deterministic “orbital” mobility pattern among these “hubs”. The macrolevel movement refers to the fact that our abstraction does not depend on the exact movement within a hub, or in between hubs. Rather, our abstraction only specifies a set of hubs where a node will repetitively visit and spend a significant amount of time. However, unlike molecules or planets that have deterministic and continuous orbital movement, mobile users do not have to follow any rigid schedules or routes. In other words, their orbital movement is partially deterministic. We also propose an effective routing protocol for MANET called Sociological Orbit aware Location Approximation and Routing (SOLAR) to take advantage of the spatial and temporal locality of the mobile users (nodes) around these hubs. We show that the orbital movement pattern is not only general enough to be realistic, but is also specific enough to be useful. More specifically, it can be used to avoid a need for constant location tracking and flooding. Extensive numerical results are presented to establish the simplicity and superiority of SOLAR over other conventional protocols, such as DSR [1] and LAR [2] in terms of higher data throughput, lower control overhead, and lower end-to-end delay. Note that our orbital movement pattern differs from existing mobility patterns studied in literature, in that it neither models the motion of the users at a micro-level (i.e., on small time scales or within small distances) [3], [4], nor simply predicts user locations via historical/statistical tracking information ([5], [6]). It also differs from the deterministic (orbital) mobility patterns assumed within Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) [7], and the probabilistic (but non-orbital) mobility patterns assumed in intermittently connected networks [8], [9]. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has explored the implication of such partially deterministic sociological orbits based mobility pattern at the macro-level and its application to routing in MANET, despite its practicality.