Investigation of the Effect of Mobility Models on Proactive and Reactive Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

ABSTRACT: Mobile ad hoc networks are made up of wireless mobile nodes. In this mobile ad hoc network, wireless mobile nodes convey messages to each other without any pre-established infrastructure or centralized control. Wireless ad hoc networks eradicate the complications which may arise while setting up the infrastructure. The mobility model is crucial when evaluating routing protocols performance in ad hoc mobile networks. Two parameters are very important when dealing with the mobility behavior of mobile nodes, these parameters are pause time and maximum speed. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of mobility models on proactive and reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector are used in our simulation as the proactive and reactive routing protocols respectively. Reference Point Group Mobility model and Random Way Point Mobility model are the group and entity mobility model used in our simulation to compare and analyze the performance of the routing protocols. In this study, the behavior analysis and comparison of the routing protocols under different mobility scenarios are evaluated using Network Simulator 2 and results of the simulations are presented. The results presented depend on four important performance metrics of ad hoc networks, which are average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load or overhead and average number of hops. Keywords: Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), Routing protocols, Mobility models, Simulation, Performance evaluation, and Network simulator (NS-2). …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………