This paper proposes a location service to assist location-based routing protocols, realized through a novel Associativity-Based clustering protocol. The main goal of our scheme, which employs hierarchical principles, is to minimize the control traffic associated with location-management. In location-based routing protocols, the control traffic is mainly due to location-updates, queries and responses. Our scheme employs a novel geographically-oriented clustering scheme in order to minimize control traffic without impairing performance. In our location management scheme, nodes are assigned home-zones, and are required to send their location-updates to their respective home-zones through a dominating-set. This strategy, unlike similar location-management approaches, minimizes inevitable superfluous flooding by every node, and prevents location updates and queries from traversing the entire network unnecessarily, hence conserving bandwidth and transmission power. The proposed scheme is evaluated through mathematical analysis and simulations, and the results indicate that our protocol scales well with increasing node-count, node-density and node-speed.
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