A comparative study of location aided routing protocols for MANET

Location-aided routing (LAR) is a mechanism which attempts to reduce the control message overhead of Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol by flooding only the portion of the network that is likely to contain the route to destination. LAR takes advantage of Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to identify a possible location of the destination node. Based on this information, LAR defines a portion of the network which will be subject to the limited flooding, thus reducing the total number of the control packet traveling through the network during the route discovery process. GeoAODV is a variation of the AODV protocol which like LAR also employs GPS coordinates to limit the search area used during the route discovery process. However, unlike LAR, GeoAODV does not make the assumption that every node in the network knows the traveling speed and location of the corresponding destination node. Instead, GeoAODV tries to dynamically learn and distribute location information among the nodes in the network. This paper examines and compares through simulation the performance of AODV, LAR, and GeoAODV protocols under different environmental settings.