LABAR: location area based ad hoc routing for GPS-scarce wide-area ad hoc networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are becoming increasingly important in today's world. The most challenging problem in conjunction with ad hoc networks is routing, i.e., the procedure in charge of determining the trajectory of packets traveling over the network. For large-scale ad hoc networks scalability of the routing approach is extremely important. One of the approaches to scale up ad hoc routing is geographical location based routing, which usually requires all nodes to be aware of their exact locations. In this paper, a new routing algorithm is proposed which requires only a subset of nodes to know their exact location forming location areas around these nodes. This paper outlines the LABAR (Location Area Based Ad Hoc Routing) routing protocol and provides simulation measurements on its average routing distance compared to the optimum shortest path.