Abstract
Location prediction in wireless communication networks is very important and hot research topic in recent times. Location prediction is the estimation of a mobile host's location at a time in future. When the future location of a mobile host is known, this information can be used in a number of ways to improve the performance of the wireless communication network protocols and in turn the overall performance of the network. The hosts are free to move anywhere. This mobility affects different protocols in the wireless communication network. The mobile hosts can move with different mobility patterns. Mobility Models are used to represent the different mobility patterns. Mobility metrics are used to differentiate the mobility models from each other. Different mobility models impact the protocols in different ways. In this paper, the importance of location prediction for improvement of different communication protocols for wireless communications is discussed. Different constituents of location prediction techniques are described. Apart from the conventional mobility prediction techniques, it is concluded that there is a need to look for non conventional solutions like bio inspired systems for making efficient location prediction techniques.