Effect of Mobility Models on Performance of Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN) has potential applications in the diverse areas such as wildlife monitoring, monitoring for pollutant levels, remote health care monitoring etc. MWSN are very similar to Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), but resource constraint attributes of MWSN demand performance analysis of effects caused by various node mobility patterns. Random Waypoint model is widely used in studies of MWSN, which does not give a true random node movement as expected in many MWSN applications. In this paper, we have evaluated the performance of Random Waypoint, Random Direction, Random Walk and Gauss Markov mobility models for four node density scenarios. Each node density scenario is simulated for three node movement speeds. A simulation based analysis of throughput, packet delivery function, end to end delay, residual energy and routing overhead is performed. Comparison is done with static WSN scenario, in order to estimate the performance degradation due to mobility environment.