Is Mobility Always Harmful to Routing Protocol Performance of MANETs

Mobility is a prominent characteristic of MANETs, and is the main factor affecting topology change and route invalidation, which finally leads to increase the design difficulty of effective routing protocol. In this paper, we have studied the impacts of mobility on routing protocol performance of MANETs with simulation, which uses ns-2 as the simulation tool, 802.11 as the wireless MAC protocol and AODV as the routing protocol. The results show that the increase of mobility does not reduce the routing protocol performance distinctly. In some circumstances, it even increases the routing protocol performance. The works of this paper can be a basis of other studies of MANETs.