Modified Location-Aided Routing Protocols for Control Overhead Reduction in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In geographical ad hoc routing, each node has to be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS). This requirement is quite realistic today as such devices are inexpensive and can provide reasonable precision. In this work, we are interested in the optimization of the geographical routing protocol, LAR (Location-Aided Routing) [1]. LAR is an on-demand routing protocol using geographical location information to limit the area for discovering a new route to a smaller "request zone". Instead of flooding the route requests into the whole network, only nodes in the request zone will forward them. Thus, the routing overhead is widely reduced. In this paper, we compare some optimization of LAR. The proposed optimizations use alternative definitions of request zone by intermediate nodes. The simulation results show that these algorithms lead to an improvement in terms of routing overhead.