Performance Study of Real-World Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

ABSTRACT: Wireless ad hoc network is one of the most popular network types these days. The reason for this is the advantages that wireless ad hoc networks provide for users or group of users. The most important characteristic of wireless ad hoc networks that make them more popular when compared with any other network type is that they do not need any infrastructure to be setup in advance. This characteristic of wireless ad hoc networks make the research on this topic more valuable due to increasing number of people using wireless ad hoc networks. The fact that no fixed router is used in the network ensures that network nodes are adaptable to the topology changes in a mobile wireless ad hoc network. This advantage makes wireless ad hoc networks useful in battlefield areas where there is need for networks that have a dynamic working strategy, which does not increase the complexity of setting a network. Other possible application areas of wireless ad hoc networks are disaster areas, rescue emergency operations and in vehicles that satisfies the required mobility and fast deployment network need. This thesis provides extensive real-world experimental investigation of wireless ad hoc networks with mobile and stationary nodes in different outdoor environments. The performance of wireless ad hoc networks is measured under various scenarios. For the experimental investigations, more than one network configuration and different parameters were used in real-world outdoor environment. Conducting such experiments and gathering information regarding the results of these experiments will yield very valuable information since investigation of such networks requires two aspects to take into account. One of them is the simulation and modeling of these networks and the other is the conducting of real-world experiments by using testbed programs. The most popular performance metrics for wireless ad hoc networks, delivery ratio, average round trip time or average end to end delay, and average number of hops were investigated in this study. It is seen that delivery ratio decreases with the distance between the nodes. The average round trip time is not affected by the distance; hence it increases with respect to application data size and the number of intermediate nodes in the network. The average number of hops changes if the distance between the source and the destination decreases since there will be no need for intermediate nodes for forwarding the packets. Keywords: Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Outdoor Experimental Study, Performance Evaluation, Multithreaded Programs, Wireless Ad Hoc Protocols. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………