This proposal is being submitted to the NSF-CONACyT Collaborative Research program. This project will be performed in collaboration with ITESM, Campus Morelos, Mexico. Mobile ad hoc networks consist of wireless mobile hosts that communicate with each other, in the absence of a fixed infrastructure. Routes between two hosts in a Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) may consist of hops through other hosts in the network. Geocasting is a variation on the notion of multicasting. A geographical area, called geocast region, is associated with a geocast, and a geocast message is delivered to all nodes present in the geocast region. Geocasting is useful to deliver messages of interest to all hosts within a given area. In mobile ad hoc networks, membership of a geocast group changes whenever hosts move in and out of the geocast region. Primary objective of this project is to develop flooding-based and tree-based approaches for geocasting in MANET and to evaluate their performance. Performance evaluation will be based on simulations as well as a prototype implementation. Because geocasts are directed towards a specified geocast region, use of directional antennas (instead of omnidirectional antennas) is expected to improve performance of geocasting in mobile ad hoc networks. Therefore, this project will also design medium access protocols for MANET using directional antennas, and evaluate performance of geocasting with directional antennas.
