An efficient location forwarding with shortcut scheme for position-based routing in mobile ad-hoc networks

Position-based routing protocols are considered as having better scalability and lower control overhead than topology-based routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Since location services are the most critical part of position-based routing protocols, we present an Efficient Location Forwarding with Shortcuts (ELFS) scheme to improve the performance of location services. The ELFS scheme uses multiple virtual home regions to achieve efficient location discovery. We develop three approaches to reducing the overhead of maintaining multiple virtual home regions. The first approach, shortcut updates, uses the idea of shortcut to decrease the frequency of global updates. The second approach, adaptive broadcasting, alleviates the cost of each global update. In certain conditions, ELFS only broadcasts the messages of location update to the regions with the longest query paths. The third approach, packet forwarding with direction awareness, reduces the path lengths of messages. It can improve the cost of transmitting location information for delay-tolerant applications. With these approaches, the frequency of global broadcasting is decreased, and the overhead of location maintenance is reduced significantly. The simulation results show that the performance of ELFS is comparably fast and stable.