Analyzing the Impact of Entity Mobility Models on the Performance of Routing Protocols in the MANET

Mobility model is the foundation of the simulation study of various protocols in the mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). The entity mobility model is a family of mobility models widely used in the study. A comparative study on entity mobility models is presented in this paper. Firstly, both the advantages and disadvantages of four typical entity mobility models are summarized; these models include the Random Walk model (RW), the Random WayPoint model (RWP), the Random Direction model (RD) and the Markov Random Path model (MRP). Secondly, focus on primary parameters of these models, effects of both the speed and the pause time on the performance metric of MANET routing protocols are analyzed. Finally, with the help of the NS-2 simulator, the effect of different entity mobility models on the performance of MANET routing protocols are analyzed. This study is significant in practice for the simulation study of MANET as well as for the design and improvement of mobility models.