Location Services in Wireless Ad Hoc and Hybrid Networks: A Survey

Location services are used in mobile ad hoc and hybrid networks either to locate the geographic position of a given node in the network or for locating a data item (content). One of the main usages of position location services is in location based routing algo-rithms. In particular, geographic routing protocols can route messages more efficiently to their destinations based on the destination node’s geographical position, which is provided by a location service. A content location service provides to the requesting node either the requested data itself or the identifier of the node that stores this data. Sometimes the position of the node that stores the data is also provided. Such data location services are useful for implementing content-sharing applications, cooperative caching, and publish subscribe systems. In this paper we present a taxonomy of location services and survey known techniques for constructing such a service in wireless ad hoc and hybrid networks.