Impact of unreliable positioning in location-based routing protocols for MANETs

MANETs have been focusing the interest of researchers for several years. The new scenarios where MANETs are being deployed make that several challenging issues remain open: node scalability, energy efficiency, network lifetime, Quality of Service (QoS), network overhead, data privacy and security, and effective routing. This latter is often seen as key since it frequently constrains the performance of the overall network. Location-based routing protocols provide a good solution for scalable MANETs. Although several location-based routing protocols have been proposed, most of them rely on error-free positions. Only few studies have focused so far on how positioning error affects the routing performance; also, most of them consider outdated solutions. This paper is aimed at filling this gap, by studying the impact of the error in the position of the nodes of two location-based routing protocols: DYMOselfwd and AODV-Line. These protocols were selected as they both aim at reducing the routing overhead. Simulations considering different mobility patterns in a dense network were conducted, so that the performance of these protocols can be assessed under ideal (i.e. error-less) and realistic (i.e. with error) conditions. The results show that AODV-Line builds less reliable routes than DYMOselfwd in case of error in the position information, thus increasing the routing overhead.