DFLS: A new distributed and fault tolerant location service method for mobile ad hoc networks

Location-based routing intends to send packets toward geographic direction of destination. For this, source nodes needs to known about destination position via a location service. Whereas the main concept of ad hoc networking is being independent from an infrastructure, applying a distribution algorithm has been a key design principle for a location service. Destruction of single nodes shouldn´t lead to disruption of location service. Moreover, scalability is a desirable characteristic for large networks. So, we offered a distributed and fault tolerant location service method (DFLS) for ad hoc networks in this paper. This method is a hierarchical and explicit Quorum-based location service method. In this method, location servers in each cluster have abstract information about other clusters. So, this method will have response time similar to flat methods. But, it is similar to hierarchical methods in terms of implementation complexity. Evaluation show that this method (DFLS), compared to the previous methods, decreased the response time to location queries and control overheads, also it increased fault tolerance and packet delivery rate.