A Unified Framework of Node Mobility Models

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of mobile nodes that communicate with each other without any infrastructure. MANET has various applications including military operations, rescue operations, and many other situations that require rapidly deployable communication networks. In order to evaluate the performance of such networks accurately through simulations, we need to use realistic conditions when simulating. User mobility pattern is an important factor that affects the performance of the network significantly. Recently, a number of mobility models have been proposed in order to produce realistic node mobility patterns. Mobility models differ considerably depending on the applications for which they are designed. In this paper, we present a unified mobility model framework. The framework can generate most of widely used mobility models with a short script. We show this by applying the framework to generate most of the existing mobility models. This framework expedites the performance evaluation process of MANETs since users do not need to write code from scratch to generate the application-specific moving patterns for the nodes.