Location management handoff overhead in hierarchically organized mobile ad hoc networks

Control overhead in a mobile ad hoc network may be reduced through hierarchical routing. However, to facilitate packet forwarding in a hierarchically organized network, each datagram must specify the hierarchical address of the destination. Maintaining and acquiring hierarchical addresses represents a location management (LM) problem and incurs control overhead in addition to that of a routing protocol. This paper considers the LM overhead due to handoff. That is, the transfer of LM data due to node mobility and volatility of the clustered hierarchy. It is shown that handoff overhead is only polylogarithmic in the node count.