ELIP: Embedded Location Information Protocol

It has been recently shown that mobility in ad hoc networks can be an advantage instead of an inconvenience. Nevertheless, one class of mobile elements has been neglected up-to-date: data packets. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of the inherent mobility of data packets to disseminate location information throughout the network. We focus on the age-and-position based (APB) routing case. Knowing its own geographic or virtual coordinates is not enough since a source needs to discover the position of the destination before establishing a communication. This is the role of a location service, which depends, in turn, on an efficient location distribution/publishing system. Our proposal, Embedded Location Information Protocol (ELIP), allows nodes to piggyback their coordinates in existing data packets in order to efficiently disseminate their positions in the network. Contrary to traditional approaches that depend on encounters between nodes, ELIP converges much faster and does not require permanent node mobility.