Designs and Evaluations of a Novel Mobility Model in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The performances of most wireless protocols and algorithms proposed in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) are often evaluated and compared by using simulations. We can change various simulation parameters to verify different networking scenarios. The impacts of various simulation parameters, such as transmission ranges, data rates, are noticeable. However, the effects of the mobility model do not attract many attentions until recently. The Random Waypoint (RWP) mobility model, due to its simplicity, is one of the most often deployed mobility models in simulations. However, it implicitly introduces many unexpected defects, such as average speed decaying and border effect. In this paper, we propose a novel mobility model, General Ripple Mobility Model (GRMM), to reduce the above mentioned problems in RWP. Furthermore, GRMM can provide another great feature, Diverse Average Speed (DAS), to generate different average speed mobility patterns easily within the same speed range. By providing DAS, simulations can be run with more general cases. We also provide the solution of warm-up time elimination for GRMM. Simulation results have shown that GRMM can generate steady results in the beginning and simultaneously achieve uniform node distribution and diverse average speed.