Performance Analysis of Mobility Based Routing Protocols in MANET

Most routing protocols in MANET adopt the popular Random Waypoint model for its simplicity and suitability for theoretical study and analysis. Recently, several entity, group and scenario based mobility models and frameworks have been proposed to model much more realistic and practical movements of mobile nodes in real scenarios. Although some work exists in evaluating routing protocols based on such specific scenarios, and some effort in adapting a protocol to suit mobility has been made, there does not exist any protocol that makes direct use of mobility information to route packets within a MANET. In this work, we first develop a practical mobility model that recognizes an orbital pattern in the sociological movement of mobile users, and then propose a novel Orbit Based Routing (OBR) protocol, that leverages the underlying orbital mobility to accurately determine a set of likely regions containing any node in the MANET. By forming a distributed location database among acquaintances and employing a scalable geographic routing to forward packets among nodes, OBR emerges as a clear choice for MANET routing in the face of practical mobility. We propose three different schemes of OBR and compare their performance against an Acquaintance Based Soft Location Management (ABSoLoM) protocol.