Location Management in Peer-to-peer Mobile Adhoc Networks

The combination of peer-to-peer systems and ad-hoc networks allows for the creation of highly dynamic, self-organizing, mobile P2P systems. By taking advantage of location information, a routing protocol in these systems can aid the mobile hosts to efficiently communicate with each other. There is a need therefore for highly scalable location management systems that can provide location information of any mobile host at any time. However, location management is a hard problem. The goal of a good location management scheme should be to provide efficient searches and updates. Updates occur when a mobile host changes location; searches occur when a mobile host wants to communicate with a mobile host whose location is unknown to the requesting host. In this report, we describe two novel location management strategies: hierarchical and decentralized. The hierarchical strategy assumes the existence of a small number beacons that act as both base stations and location servers. Beacons are logically connected in a binary tree topology and are mobile like the mobile hosts. The de-centralized approach employs a version of a well-known peer-to-peer search technique to achieve location management amongst mobile hosts without the existence of beacons. We evaluate the two strategies though simulations and compare them based on their effectiveness in enabling a greater number of successful transmissions between the mobile hosts.