Impact of Mobility Models on the Performance of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc network consists of wireless mobile nodes, where nodes convey message to each other without any pre-established infrastructure or centralized control. The wireless ad hoc network eradicates the complications which may arise while setting up the infrastructure. The mobility model is crucial when evaluating routing protocols exhibition in mobile ad hoc networks. Two parameters are very important when dealing with mobility behavior of mobile nodes: pause time and maximum speed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of mobility model on state of art proactive and reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. The Reference Point Group Mobility model and the Random Way Point Mobility model represent the group and an entity mobility model used in this simulation to compare and analyze the performance of the routing protocols. In this study the performance analysis and comparison of the routing protocols under different mobility scenarios are evaluated in Network Simulator 2. Four important performance metrics of ad hoc networks including average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load or overhead and average number of hops are considered. Based on the empirical study, both propagation models cause different impact on the AODV and DSDV routing protocol. Where, AODV performs better with the RPGM than the RWPM with respect to end-to end-delay, normalized routing load and average number of hops. However, in delivery ratio AODV performs better with the RWPM than the RPGM. On the other hand, AODV and DSDV protocols have similar results in delivery ratio and average number of hops and DSDV performed better than AODV in normalized routing and end-to-end delay. Finally, it can be concluded that no protocol significantly outperforms the other in all scenarios and matrics considered.