Investigating the Impact of Mobility Models on MANET Routing Protocols

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a type of multi-hop network under different movement patterns without requiring any fixed infrastructure or centralized control. The mobile nodes in this network moves arbitrarily and topology changes frequently. In MANET routing, protocols play an important role to make reliable communication between nodes. There are several issues affecting the performance of MANET routing protocols. Mobility is one of the most significant factors that have an impact on the routing process. In this paper, FCM, SCM, RWM and HWM mobility models are designed to analyze the performance of AODV, OLSR and GRP protocols, with ten pause time values. These models are based on varying speeds and pause time of MANET participants. Different node parameters such as data drop rate, average end-to-end delay, media access delay, network load, retransmission attempts and throughput are used to make a performance comparison between mobility models. The simulation results showed that in most of the cases OLSR protocol provides better performance than other two routing protocols and it is more suitable for networks that require low delay and retransmission attempts, and high throughput.