Writing on water, a lightweight soft-state tracking framework for dense mobile ad hoc networks

In a mobile ad hoc network, tracking protocols need to deal with-in addition to the mobility of the target- the mobility of the intermediate nodes that maintain a track toward the target. To address this problem, we propose the MDQT (Mobility-enhanced Distributed QuadTree) tracking framework. MDQT employs a static cell abstraction to mask the mobility of the nodes and provide the illusion of a logical static network overlaid on the mobile network. MDQT implements this virtual static network layer in a lightweight/communication-free manner by exploiting the soft-state principle and the snooping feature of wireless communication. Using simulations, we study the effects of the mobility speed and the percentage of mobile nodes on the performance of our MDQT framework. We find that even at very high mobility speeds (50 meters per second), low update rates (1 update per second), and 100% node mobility, the success rate of MDQT tracking is above 85% and the latency is comparable with that of static networks.