Scalability analysis of location management protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

Geography based routing in mobile ad hoc networks is an application that uses the location information of nodes in a network to route data packets. Since the amount of network state information that each node needs to maintain in order to route packets is minimal, location based routing is considered scalable compared to existing routing protocols in ad hoc networks. However, geographic routing requires location management, where the locations of destination nodes needs to be found before the actual routing can begin. Many location management schemes have been proposed in the literature, but no prior work has quantitatively compared the scalability of these protocols with respect to the increase in the number of nodes in the network. In this work, we use a theoretical framework to show the asymptotic scalability of three location management protocols. We also carry out extensive simulations to study the performance of these protocols under practical considerations. Our results indicate that all protocols perform well, with a slight performance degradation with the increasing network size. In particular, the hierarchical grid location management protocol (HGRID) performs the best for all practical purposes, and is a candidate for location management in a wireless network architecture.