Performance Evaluation of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks in Realistic Mobility and Fading Environments

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are wireless networks, which consist of a collection of mobile nodes with no fixed infrastructure, where each node acts as a router that participates in forwarding data packets. They are a new paradigm of wireless communications for mobile hosts that are resource-constrained with only limited energy, computing power and memory. Previous studies on MANETs concentrated more on energy conservation in an idealistic environment without taking into consideration, the effects of realistic mobility, interference and fading. The definition of realistic mobility models is one of the most critical and, at the same time, difficult aspects of the simulations of networks designed for real mobile ad hoc environments. The reason for this is that most scenarios for which ad hoc networks are used have features such as dynamicity and extreme uncertainties. Thus use of real life measurements is currently almost impossible and most certainly expensive. Hence the commonly used alternative is to simulate the movement patterns and hence the reproduction of movement traces quite similar to human mobility behavior is extremely important. The synthetic models used for movement pattern generation should reflect the movement of the real mobile devices, which are usually carried by humans, so the movement of such devices is necessarily based on human decisions. Regularity is an important characteristic of human movement patterns. All simulated movement models are suspect because there is no means of accessing to what extent they map reality. However it is not difficult to see that random mobility models such as Random Walk, Random Waypoint (default model used in almost all network simulations), etc., generate movements that are most non-humanlike. Hence we need to focus on more realistic mobility models such as Gauss Markov, Manhattan Grid, Reference Point Group Mobility Model (RPGM), Column, Pursue and other Hybrid mobility models. These models capture certain mobility characteristics that emulate the realistic MANETs movement, such as temporal dependency, spatial dependency and geographic restriction. Also a Rayleigh/Ricean fading channel is introduced to obtain a realistic fading environment. The energy consumed by the data, MAC, ARP and RTR packets using IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol with the various mobility models in fading and non-fading channel conditions are obtained using ns-2 simulations and AWK programs. The realistic movement patterns are generated using three different mobility generators BonnMotion Mobility Generator, Toilers Code and Scengen Mobility Generator. This thesis work performs an in-depth study on th eeffects of realistic mobility and fading on energy consumption, packet delivery ratio and control overhead of MANETs