Quorum and connected dominating sets based location service in wireless ad hoc, sensor and actuator networks

Location service provides position of mobile destination to source node to enable geo-routing. In existing quorum-based location service protocols, destination node registers its location along a 'column' while source node makes a query along a 'row'. Grid and quorum-based location service is based on division of network into square grids, and selecting 'leader' location server node in each grid. Location updates, leader reelection and information transfer are performed whenever destination and leader nodes are moving to a different grid. We propose here to apply connected dominating sets (DS) as an alternative to grids. We also improved basic quorum, and applied on DS-quorum (DS based quorum) better criterion for triggering local information exchanges and global location updates, by meeting two criteria: certain distance movement and certain number of observed link changes with (DS) nodes. Backbones created by DS nodes (using 1-hop neighborhood information) are small size, do not have a parameter like grid size, and preserve network connectivity without the help of other nodes. Location updates and destination searches are restricted to backbone nodes. Both methods use 'hello' messages to learn neighbors. While this suffices to construct DS, grid leader (re)election requires additional messages. Simulation results show that using DS as backbone for quorum construction is superior to using grid as backbone or no backbone at all. The proposed DS-quorum location service can achieve higher (or similar) success rate with much less communication overhead than grid-based approaches. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.