Acquaintance based soft location management (ABSLM) in MANET

A major challenge faced in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is locating devices for communication, especially with high node mobility and sparse node density. Present solutions provided by ad hoc routing protocols range from flooding the entire network with route requests, to deploying a separate location management scheme to maintain a device location database. In this work, we propose a novel scheme called Acquaintance Based Soft Location Management (ABSLM) in MANET. In ABSLM, nodes make use of the real life concept of making acquaintances and keeping in touch with them regarding each other's current locations. ABSLM has a two-fold aim: to avoid the overhead of flooding; and to use a 'soft' location management setup that does not require strict location management strategies and is thus computationally less expensive than standard 'hard' location management schemes. Simulation results show that ABSLM not only outperforms existing flooding schemes in terms of throughput, overhead and location discovery latency, but also achieves performance comparable to 'hard' grid based location management schemes with a much lower control overhead.