This thesis is concerned with the development and analysis of a new hybrid location-based routing protocol for ad hoc wireless networks. A feature that permeates throughout this work is the use of all available location information within the network in order to minimize the routing overhead. Such minimization leads to an enhanced scalability performance for the network. More directly, we can say the main contribution of this thesis is that it introduces a new Hybrid Location-based Ad-hoc

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... g protocol (HLAR) designed specifically with optimal scalability performance in mind. The HLAR protocol combines features of reactive routing with geographic routing in such a manner so as to efficiently use all location information available, and to gracefully exit to reactive routing as the location information degrades. An important aspect of HLAR is that it can be spatially dependent - meaning different physical areas of the network may utilize different routing procedures simultaneously. A key feature of HLAR is the consideration given to realistic location errors within the protocol design. Through detailed analysis and detailed Monte Carlo simulations we investigate the scalability of the HLAR protocol within different environments and different target applications. A particular focus is the use of HLAR within the Vehicular ad hoc Network (VANET) environment. We demonstrate how HLAR is the ideal routing protocol for emerging VANET systems in that it produces effectively optimal scalability over a wide range of the anticipated environment variables. We demonstrate that similar scalability performance is expected for slower moving pedestrian ad hoc networks. We also introduce a simplified version of HLAR, which we refer to as Geographic Routing with Congestion Avoidance (GRCA), which is specifically designed for VoIP applications. The GRCA protocol couples a congestion avoidance algorithm specifically designed for VoIP, to a greedy geographic forwarding algorithm in order to deliver two key attributes that hitherto ar [...]