The performance impact of traffic patterns on routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the communication model widely used in simulation studies of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We find that the communication model uses an overly simplistic traffic pattern which restricts the number of connections that originate from each source node to be one or two, and thus the communication model may not represent traffic patterns in many potential applications in MANETs. We then propose a new communication model which extends the previous communication model to include a more general traffic pattern that varies the number of connections per source node. We study the performance impact of traffic patterns on various routing protocols via detailed simulations of a MANET of 112 mobile nodes. Our simulation results show that many of the conclusions drawn in previous protocol comparison studies no longer hold under the new communication model. These results motivate the need for performance evaluation of MANETs to not only include rich and diverse mobility models as has been done in the past but also include diverse traffic patterns that stress a wide set of protocol design issues.