Location management in mobile ad hoc wireless networks using quorums and clusters

Position-based reactive routing is a scalable solution for routing in mobile ad hoc networks. The route discovery algorithm in position-based routing can be efficiently implemented only if the source knows the current address of the destination. In this paper, a quorum-based location management scheme is proposed. Location servers are selected using the minimum dominating set (MDS) approach, and are further organized into quorums for location update and location query. When a mobile node moves, it updates its location servers in the update quorum; when a node requests the location information of another node, it will send a query message to the location servers in the query quorum. We propose to use the position-based quorum system, which is easy to construct and guarantees that the update quorums always intersect with the query quorums so that at least one location server in the query quorum is aware of the most recent location of the mobile node. Clusters are introduced for large scale ad hoc networks for scalability. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme provides good scalability when network size increases. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.