SEEKER: An Adaptive and Scalable Location Service for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Location-based routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) use geographic information to achieve higher scalability and lower control overhead than those of the topology-based routing protocols, e.g. AODV and DSR, etc. However, location-based routing protocols rely on location services to acquire the location information of the destination node so that they can forward packets to the destination properly. To keep the advantage of the location-based routing protocol, the location service should have high scalability and low control overhead. This paper proposes a location service called SEEKER to accomplish such goals. The basic idea of SEEKER is aggregate update, which integrates a group of position updates for the purpose of performing them altogether. In this way, a lot of location maintenance (update) overhead is reduced, while query success rate is still kept comparably high. Moreover, SEEKER can adapt to mobility by changing the frequency of location updates, which can further reduce the overhead. We simulate SEEKER and compare it with related location services. The results show that SEEKER has comparably good performances.