Performance Evaluation of Location Management Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

With the availability of location based services, applications that use locations for optimal performance will require efficient location management algorithms, where user locations are kept track with minimal system overhead. Geography based routing in mobile ad hoc networks is one such application that uses location information of nodes in a network to route data packets. Previous work in this area has shown that the selection of location management protocol is critical to the performance of such routing algorithms. Many location management schemes have been proposed in literature, and in an effort to quantitatively compare the performance of some of these schemes, we carry out extensive simulations to study SLURP, SLALoM and HGRID, three grid based protocols described in literature. Our study is two pronged – to compare the performance of location management with network mobility as well as traffic load, and to evaluate the effect these protocols have on the performance of geographic routing in mobile ad hoc networks. Our results show that the Hierarchical Grid Location Management protocol (HGRID) achieves steady performance for data throughput and delay, and minimally affects the performance of geographic routing.