Scalability in Global Mobile Information Systems (GloMo): Issues, evaluation methodology and experiences

The GloMo (Global Mobile Information Systems) project 1 has focused on developing new wireless ad hoc networking technologies. These new technologies rely on a broad and varied set of techniques to help cope with the problems inherent in the wireless environment. One of the most critical design elements of all the various technologies is their applicability in large scale deployments. The main objective of our work is to develop and implement a simulation methodology to help evaluate the scalability of these new ad hoc networking technologies and gain some insight into the various aspects of ad hoc network performance scalability issues. To achieve that we have developed a scalability performance evaluation framework and plan, that spans all the various dimensions of scalability: size (number of nodes and density), traffic, operational environment (i.e. propagation models, terrain etc.), mobility. For demonstration purposes we have applied this process on a representative integrated protocol suite designed to provide communication services in mobile ad hoc wireless networks. The corresponding results of the two most critical aspects of scalability properties in tactical networks (i.e. network initialization time and traffic scalability) are also presented here, and demonstrate that a very extensive evaluation of the corresponding scalability metrics under a combination of the various scalability dimensions defined in this paper, is necessary in order to provide an in-depth analysis of the scalability properties in wireless mobile ad hoc networking environments.