A novel K-hop cluster-based location service protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents a novel k -hop Cluster-based Location Service (KCLS) protocol in mobile ad hoc networks, in which each cluster-head works as distributed location server to maintain the topology and connectivity within the cluster using the proposed inter-cluster location update mechanism, which is able to well balance the tradeoff between the communication overheads and the accuracy of location information. The other advantages of the proposed KCLS protocol include excellent network scalability and capability of tolerance the link breakage, which can significantly reduce communication overheads and the latency caused by route path recovery. The numerical results obtained from simulations have shown that the cost of location management using KCLS protocol is less than two percent of the cost of location management using link state protocol under the same condition. Especially for a large value of k, the proposed KCLS protocol is not only able to suppress the increase rate of the total cost when the number of hosts in the network increases, but also able to reduce the passive effect of host mobility on control overheads.