Spontaneous Group Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper deals with the problem of Location Management in mobile ad hoc networks where users are organized in groups. In the following this type of systems are referred to as Mobile Ad hoc Networks for Group Operations (MANGO). This paper proposes a framework for location management which exploits the trend of mobile users to spontaneously form groups in MANGOs. The management procedures required to support such spontaneous groups, which are by nature dynamic, are introduced as well. The proposed spontaneous group management is based on a hierarchical location database architecture and the concept of Group Leader, which is a terminal responsible for the location update of a group of terminals. Objective of the proposed framework is minimizing the burden on location databases and, at the same time, the signaling issued by terminals. In this paper, distributed operations required to support the whole framework are properly introduced and described. Simulation experiments have been run in order to assess the proposed scheme. Performance results show that the introduced methodology allows reduced signaling and location updating.