A group mobility model for ad hoc wireless networks

In this paper, we present a survey of various mobility models in both cellular networks and multi-hop networks. We show that group motion occurs frequently in ad hoc net-works, and introduce a novel group mobility model- Refer-ence Point Group Mobility (RPGM)- to represent the rela-tionship among mobile hosts. RPGM can be readily applied to many existing applications. Moreover, by proper choice of parameters, RPGM can be used to model several mobil-ity models which were previously proposed. One of the main themes of this paper is to investigate the impact of the mo-bility model on the performance of a specific network proto-col or application. To this end, we have applied our RPGM model to two different network protocol scenarios, cluster-ing and routing, and have evaluated network performance under different mobility patterns and for different protocol implementations. As expected, the results indicate that dif-ferent mobility patterns affect the various protocols in dif-ferent ways. In particular, the ranking of routing algorithms is influenced by the choice of mobility pattern.