Mobile Intelligence

7.5 CONCLUSION

This chapter presents a novel location service protocol based on the clustering architecture, which has the following advantages in support of multihop wireless networks. First, it is able to significantly reduce the overheads by the use of simple cluster-level route combined with self-determined inter-cluster forwarding based on cluster mobility pattern or group characteristics. Next, the clustering architecture based on cluster ID has flexible scalability in support of large-scale multihop wireless networks. Third, it has the capability of cluster-level self-route recovery against interlink failures. Finally, on the basis of the distance effect, it is able to provide more accurate location information within the cluster and nearby neighborhoods, which matches the dynamic nature of multihop wireless networks very well.

The numerical results obtained from simulations indicate that both the overheads in the initial stage and the total cost in the location maintenance stage decrease with the increase in k. A large value of k is not only able to suppress the increasing rate of the total cost when the number of nodes in the network increases, but it is also able to increase the hit probability for location service and reduce the passive effect of node mobility. Moreover, scaling factor σ is also used to balance the cost and the accuracy of location service. With optimal values of k and σ, the total cost for using KCLS is less than 2% of the total cost for using link ...