A zone-based location service for mobile ad hoc networks

Location-based routing has received significant attention for ad hoc networking. The motivation to use location-based routing is that it eliminates the need to maintain routes and therefore is very well suited for highly mobile networks. However, as an essential prerequisite for location-based routing, a location service is needed from which a node can learn the current position of other nodes present in the network. We present a zone-based location service (ZLS), which provides a mechanism to track the location information of other nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. Preliminary results indicate that the zone-based location service (ZLS) can be combined with a packet forwarding strategy to provide an efficient location-based routing protocol in a mobile ad hoc environment. The simulation results reported are our first steps towards meeting this goal.