A Framework for Evaluating the Performance of Mobillity Models for Adhoc Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless area have generated a great interest in creating and utilizing ad hoc mobile networks in our day-to-day lives. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless devices which can be configured without using any pre-existing infrastructure or central controller. The mobility and scalability are the basic parameters of MANETs. The application of MANETs comprises of emergency search-rescue operations, meetings, battlefield or disaster areas, communication between moving vehicles and/or soldiers. There are many factors that impact the performance evaluation of such networks. These factors include the transmission range, the buffer space for message storage, the battery power, the computing power, the data traffic model and the used mobility model. A mobility model signifies the movement of the mobile nodes within the network. The simulation results obtained with unrealistic mobility models such as random models which may fail to capture movement of mobile nodes in the real world scenario such as moving vehicles as their velocity at current epoch depends on velocity at previous epoch may not correctly reflect the true performance of a protocol. Moreover, mobile nodes in random models move independent of each other but in military applications there is a specific leader whom nodes follow so spatial models comes in the picture here. The appropriate design and selection of the mobility model is essential as it supports realistic and accurate protocol simulations. Our thesis work aims to conduct a parametric study using the simulation technique to evaluate the performance of ad hoc mobile networks using different mobility models. In order to illustrate how the choice of the mobility models (random, spatial, geographic etc) impact the network performance of ad hoc protocols to be simulated, this research will perform a comparison among these models considering the performance metrics: throughput, end-to-end delay, normalized routing load and dropped packets.