On Design of an Efficient Hierarchical Location Service for Ad Hoc Network

Many geographic routing protocols have been proposed to aid routing path discovery. They can help to reduce the cost of broadcasting, and increase the battery life time of the whole system. However, most such protocols made a strong assumption that the position of the destination node is easy to know or is readily available. In reality, the assumption does not hold by itself. A mechanism is required to derive the position information about the destination node. In this paper, we present an algorithm, called Hierarchical Location Service (HLS), which can efficiently provide position information about nodes in ad hoc networks. The position information can not only aid routing discovery, but also saves the resource of the whole system. HLS is a hierarchical architecture to maintain the location information of nodes. We also mention some update/query problem of location service would be happened in hierarchical manner, and we discuss how HLS can solve these problems when providing the location service.