Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of tracking mobile nodes and locating them prior to establishing new communications. However, existing location management schemes in cellular and wireless local area networks cannot be directly applied to wireless mesh networks (WMNs) without non-trivial modifications due to the special properties of WMNs. In this paper, we propose a hybrid location tracking chain (Hatch) framework which includes a hierarchical architecture design and a hybrid location tracking scheme for location management in WMNs. Under the Hatch framework, a location update scheme is developed that takes the number of hops into consideration. Moreover, the proposed location tracking chain is formed by the routing protocol adopted by WMNs and the length of location tracking can be dynamically changed to improve the performance of packet delivery. We evaluate the proposed location management schemes in different case studies using OPNET simulations, the results of which show the efficiency of our proposed location management scheme in WMNs.
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