VIMLOC Location Management in Wireless Meshes: Experimental Performance Evaluation and Comparison

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental performance evaluation of the distributed Virtual Home Region Multi-Hash Location Service (VIMLOC). This is, up to our knowledge, the first location management scheme specifically designed and implemented for medium/large-scale wireless mesh networks (WMNs,) which are seen as a cost-effective solution to provide broadband wireless access in large areas. Therefore, if the use of geographic routing is assumed for scalability reasons, such a location management is needed to map between the identifier of a node and its current position in the network (i.e., location address). Furthermore, this paper also presents what is, up to our knowledge, the first experimental performance comparison over a WMN testbed of three different location management schemes, namely proactive, reactive, and VIMLOC. All three schemes have been implemented in the Click modular router framework. For the scenario under test, the quantitative results show that the VIMLOC protocol has comparable (or better) success rate to that of the proactive and reactive schemes. Additionally, VIMLOC outperforms these schemes in terms of overall overhead, state volume, and efficiency parameters, in general.