Location-Aided

Routing (LAR) in
Mobile Ad Hoc
Networks
Young-Bae Ko and Nitin H. Vaidya
Recipient of the MOBICOM'98
Best Student Paper Award

Problem
D

t10

B
E

Route Discovery Using

Flooding
route request

route reply

B
E

Location-Aided Routing

Main Idea

Using location information to reduce the

number of nodes to whom route request is
propagated.
Location-aided route discovery based on
limited flooding

Location Information

Consider a node S that needs to find a route to

node D.
Assumption:

each host in the ad hoc network knows its current

location precisely (location error considered in one of
their simulations)
node S knows that node D was at location L at time t0,
and that the current time is t1

Location services in ad hoc networks, refer to

A survey on position-based routing in mobile ad hoc net

works
, M. Mauve, J. Widmer, and H. Hartenstein, IEEE
Network, Vol. 15 No. 6, 2001.

Expected Zone

expected zone of D ---- the region that node S

expects to contain node D at time t1, only an
estimate made by node S

Request Zone

LARs limited flooding

A node forwards a route

request only if it belongs
to the request zone
The request zone should
include

expected zone
other regions around the
expected zone

No guarantee that a path

can be found consisting
only of the hosts in a
chosen request zone.

timeout
expanded request zone

Trade-off between

latency of route
determination
the message overhead

Membership of Request
Zone

How a node determine

if it is in the request
zone for a particular
route request
LAR scheme 1
LAR scheme 2

LAR Scheme 1

LAR Scheme 2
S knows the location (Xd, Yd) of
node D at time t0
Node S calculates its distance
from location (Xd, Yd): DISTs
Node I receives the route request,
calculates its distance from
location (Xd, Yd): DISTi
For some parameter ,
If DISTs + DISTi, node I
replaces DISKs by DISKi and
forwards the request to its
neighbors; otherwise discards the
route request

Error in Location Estimate

Let e denote the maximum error in the
coordinates estimated by a node.
Modified LAR scheme 1

Expected Zone

e+v(t1-t0)

(Xd, Yd)

Evaluation

Comparing

Flooding
LAR scheme 1
LAR scheme 2

Study Cases on Varying

number of nodes in the network

transmission range of each node

15, 30, 50 nodes

200, 300, 400, or 500 units

moving speed

consider average speed (v) in range 1.5 to 32.5 units/sec

Definition of Evaluation
Metric

DP: data packets

RP: routing packets

data packets received by the destination

routing related packets (i.e., route request,
route reply and route error) received by
various nodes

#Routing packets per Data packet

Varying the Average Speed

Varying the Transmission

Range

Varying the Number of

Nodes

# Routing Packets per Route

Discovery

Impact of Location Error (I)

Impact of Location Error

(II)

Variations and
Optimizations

Alternative Definitions of Request Zone

increasing the request zone gradually?

Adaptation of Request Zone

Propagation of Location and Speed
Information
Local Search

More Recent Work on Forwarding Strategy

& Work on Location Service

see
A survey on position-based routing in mobile a
d hoc networks
, M. Mauve, J. Widmer, and H. Hartenstein,
IEEE Network, Vol. 15 No. 6, 2001.