A Simulation Study on the Impact of Mobility Models on the Network Connectivity, Hop Count and Lifetime of Routes for Ad hoc Networks

The high-level contribution of this paper is a simulation-based analysis of the network connectivity, hop count and lifetime of the routes determined for ad hoc networks under the following four mobility models: Random Waypoint model, Gauss-Markov model, City Section model and the Manhattan model. Two kinds of routes are determined: routes with the minimum hop count and routes with the longest lifetime. Extensive simulations have been conducted for different conditions of network density and node mobility for each of the four mobility models and also for different values of the degree of randomness parameter for the Gauss-Markov mobility model. We arrive at rankings of the mobility models with respect to network connectivity, hop count of minimum hop routes, lifetime of minimum hop routes, lifetime of stable routes and the hop count of stable routes. We also observe a route lifetime–hop count tradeoff for all the four mobility models. The general trend of the results is: the more realistic and constrained is a mobility model, the larger is the number of hops in the minimum hop routes and smaller is the lifetime of the stable routes determined under the mobility model.