Dual-Region Location Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

We propose and analyze a novel location management scheme for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) called Dual-region Mobility Management (DrMoM). The basic design concept of DrMoM is to use local regions to complement existing location services in MANETs that assign home regions to mobile nodes and have mobile nodes in the home region of a mobile node serve as location servers for that node. DrMoM is based on the design notion of integrated mobility and service management for network cost minimization. Specifically, unlike existing location services that define the home region size statically at design time for all mobile users, DrMoM dynamically determines the optimal home region size and local region size per mobile user based on mobility and service characteristics of individual mobile nodes to minimize the overall network cost incurred by location management and data packet delivery. We develop a performance model to derive the optimal values of these two key design parameters under which the overall network cost incurred by DrMoM is minimized. Through a comparative performance study, we show that DrMoM outperforms a well-known scheme called SLURP based on static home regions as well as a region-based location management scheme called RUDLS which claims to outperform contemporary region-based location management schemes.