Mobility Modeling of Rush Hour Traffic for Multihop Routing in Mobile Wireless Networks

Simulation is a critical tool for analyzing the performance of multihop routing protocols for mobile wireless networks, be it, autonomous mobile ad hoc networks or multihop extensions to infrastructure- based 3G/4G mobile networks. Node movement and network topology are critical factors determining the performance of routing protocols. Using unrealistic mobility models in simulations, e.g. random waypoint, result in performance results that do not reflect the actual deployment scenarios. In this paper, two typical features of rush hour traffic conditions are considered. Firstly, we focus on modeling high node traffic areas where there is a surge of traffic at specific times. Secondly, we study the choice of destinations which tend to be inversely proportional to the exponential of the distance of the destination from the origin since people tend to travel to locations that are nearer rather than further. We then show that protocols which typically perform well under the random waypoint model perform poorly in the more realistic Rush Hour model.