GRID: A fully location-aware routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is one consisting of a set of mobile hosts capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of base sta tions. One prospective direction to assist routing in such an environment i s to use location information provided by positioning devices such as globa l positioning systems (GPS). In this paper, we propose a new routing protoc ol called GRID. which tries to exploit location information in route discov ery, packet relay, and route maintenance. Existing protocols, as compared t o ours, are either not location-aware or partially location-aware in that l ocation knowledge is not fully exploited in all these three aspects. One at tractive feature of our protocol is its strong route maintenance capability - the intermediate hosts of a route can perform a "handoff" operation simi lar to that in cellular systems when it roams away to keep a route alive. T his makes routes in the MANET more stable and insensitive to host mobility. Simulation results show that our GRID routing protocol can reduce the prob ability of route breakage, reduce the number of route discovery packets use d, and lengthen routes' lifetime.