Scalable and efficient dual-region based mobility management for ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose and analyze the design notion of dual-region mobility management (DrMoM) for achieving scalable, efficient location management of mobile nodes in ad hoc networks. The basic idea is to employ local regions to complement existing home region based location service schemes that assign a home region through hashing to a mobile node and have mobile nodes in both the home and local regions serve as location servers for that node. The most salient feature of DrMoM is that the optimal home region size and local region size can be dynamically determined per mobile user based on mobility and service characteristics of individual mobile nodes to minimize the overall network cost incurred by location management and data packet delivery. Moreover, DrMoM is completely distributed. Each node determines its optimal home region size and local region size autonomously. A performance analysis is performed to demonstrate the benefit of DrMoM over existing region-based location management schemes.