On the effects of fading and mobility in on-demand routing protocols

One of the most overlooked factors in evaluating performance of ad hoc routing protocols is the variation in received signal strength known as fading. Many types of routing protocols have been proposed based on simplified assumptions and unrealistic propagation models that neglect the effect of fading. The choice of propagation models have a great impact on performance, so realistic models are necessary to consider the effect of fading as far as an accurate analysis of performance of the routing protocols is concerned. In this paper, comparative analysis of two on demand ad hoc routing protocols is performed in order to study the impact of mobility and fading on performance. The non-fading models such as free space and two ray ground are simulated for comparison with fading models such as Shadowing, Ricean, and Rayleigh fading. The simulation results reveal that the fading models have a significantly degraded network performance with respect to two mobility scenarios.