POSTAL: Scalable range-free positioning in MANETs using regions of interest

We introduce POSTAL, a new range-free positioning protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that eliminates the need of constantly flooding the whole network with positioning information. The proposed protocol is based on regions of interest which are connected components of the MANET spanning a beacon (or reference) node and one or more nodes interested in estimating their position. These regions of interest are activated and deactivated on-demand, and their purpose is to confine control signaling in order to augment the spatial reutilization of bandwidth. In the last stage, POSTAL nodes employ probabilistic multilateration to estimate their position from noisy estimates of distances to three or more references. Experimental results based on extensive simulations show that POSTAL attains similar or better precision than representative range-free positioning algorithms for MANETs such as DV-Hop, Amorphous, Centroid and APIT. The experiments also show that the signaling used in POSTAL is more scalable than the one used by traditional range-free algorithms without compromising coverage.