A Zone-based location service for geocasting in mobile ad hoc networks

Position-based routing significantly improves routing performance in ad hoc networking. In these routing protocols, a location service is needed from which a node can learn the current position of other nodes in the network. A sender node then uses this information to improve the efficiency in the transmission of packets. The Zone-based location service (ZLS) provides a mechanism for a node to record location information of every other mobile node within a local neighborhood, which we refer to as a location update zone. The location update zone radius i.e. the distance in hops defines the scope of the location update that nodes´ location information is relayed. In this paper we present a position-based routing algorithm, which combines ZLS and restricted directional flooding, for geocasting in an ad hoc network. The goal of geocasting is to deliver packets to a group of nodes that are within a specified geographical region. The simulation results show that the location update zone radius controls the tradeoff between the overhead and accuracy of geocast delivery.