Integrated Routing and Positioning in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

This work presents the first integrated framework for positioning and multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this new approach, the same control signaling is used to support multicast routing and positioning, eliminating the distinction between on-demand and proactive signaling, which are substituted by interest-driven signaling. We also present the POSTAL PRIME protocol which is an instantiation of this integrated routing and positioning framework. We use the concept of region of interest to identify connected components of the network that include sources and destinations in the case of routing, and beacons and nodes with interest in computing their position in the case of positioning. This way, we can restrict the dissemination of control signaling to these regions, augmenting the spatial reutilization of bandwidth. POSTAL PRIME also introduces the probabilistic multilateration method for estimating the position of a node based on the position of three or more references and noisy estimates of distances to them. To assess the effectiveness of POSTAL PRIME, we present a detailed simulation-based analysis. The experimental results show that POSTAL PRIME outperforms the combined use of ODMRP+Amorphous, which are the most representative multicast routing and positioning protocols in MANETs.