Degree of node proximity

Abstract

Spatial mobility metrics are used in several areas in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), such as protocol evaluation, and the design of clustering algorithms. We show that current spatial mobility metrics do not take into account spatial dependence in the absence of node movement. In order to provide a better understanding of spatial dependence, we propose a more comprehensive mobility metric, Degree of Node Proximity (DNP), based on the average distance among mobile nodes. Through simulation, we compared our metric against other well-known spatial metric over several classes of mobility models. DNP is shown able to capture spatial dependence in scenarios with different levels of node pause time. Besides that, DNP is not biased towards node speed, being able to distinguish group-based mobility models from others. As an additional contribution, we proposed several regression models for predicting DNP for the random, group, and grid-based mobility models under consideration in this paper.