Performance of dead reckoning‐based location service for mobile ad hoc networks

A predictive model‐based mobility tracking method, called dead reckoning, is developed for mobile ad hoc networks. It disseminates both location and movement models of mobile nodes in the network so that every node is able to predict or track the movement of every other node with a very low overhead. The basic technique is optimized to use ‘distance effect’, where distant nodes maintain less accurate tracking information to save overheads. The dead reckoning‐based location service mechanism is evaluated against three known location dissemination service protocols: simple, distance routing effect algorithm for mobility (DREAM) and geographic region summary service (GRSS). The evaluation is done with geographic routing as an application. It is observed that dead reckoning significantly outperforms the other protocols in terms of packet delivery fraction. It also maintains low‐control overhead. Its packet delivery performance is only marginally impacted by increasing speed or noise in the mobility model, that affects its predictive ability. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.