A location information-based route discovery protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a set of mobile nodes that agreed upon forming a temporary, spontaneous network in spite of the lack of any infrastructure or centralized administration. MANET topology changes frequently and arbitrarily due to node mobility. Therefore, an efficient routing protocol is required to cope with the dynamic change of MANET topology, which requires discovering and maintaining new routes, in this paper we propose a route discovery protocol based on location information, which could be provided to MANET nodes by a Global Positioning System (GPS). Our route discovery protocol utilizes the essential features of Voronoi diagrams in order to reduce the search space of routes by allowing only a small subset of MANET nodes, called authorized forwarders, to forward a route request. This results in a restrictive, selective route discovery protocol, which significantly reduces the routing overhead compared to other location-based routing protocol, such as LAR.