Effect of Wireless Channels on the Performance of Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc (MANET) network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. To accomplish forwarding a packet to its destination, a routing protocol is used to discover routes between these nodes. This article presents a variety of results for packet-level simulations for the popular protocol—dynamic source routing (DSR)—when different channel models are used. Different radio propagation models representing the wireless channel have been proposed over the years, each one being suitable for a certain situation. The simplest model that represents wireless propagation is the freespace model. Other propagation models are the tworay ground reflection model and the shadowing model. Simulation results show that the performance metrics are highly affected by the channel model used, even the energy left or the number of nodes left alive are also different.