A Proposal to Stabilize the Random Waypoint Mobility Model for Ad Hoc Network Simulation

Abstract

It has been recently shown that the instantaneous average node speed for the random waypoint (RWP) mobility model may not reach a steady state regime due to velocity gradual decaying which can cause inaccurate results in simulations and communication protocol validations for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This paper presents a modification to the RWP model, in which we propose to choose node speeds from a BETA(2,2) distribution, demonstrating analytically and by simulations that our idea stabilizes the instantaneous average node speed and consequently other important network metrics, like control overhead, number of dropped data packets and delivery delay. The proposal of alteration not only eliminates the decaying problem of the average node speed but also provides average values closer to the commonly supposed average velocity (V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> + V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">min</sub> )/2 than those of the original RWP model. In addition, the proposed change for the RWP model can be readily incorporated into network simulators.