GPS-free mobility metrics for mobile ad hoc networks

Efficient mobility metrics are necessary for mobile ad hoc networks to measure the impact of node mobility on performance. Normally, measuring mobility requires the use of complex localisation systems. A new mobility metric for performance measurements, the intra-vicinity dependency, is proposed. Its main novelty is that it can fully capture the relative motions between a node and its vicinity in a 2D plane, in real-time, using simple triangulation. Variants of this metric are proposed for predicting the performance of networks that follow group and random mobility models (e.g. inter-group inter-meeting times and packet delivery rate). To make the proposed mobility metrics more robust in noisy environments, a calibration method is also proposed for improving accuracy. Experimental results show that, without the help of any localisation systems, the proposed metrics enable a more accurate approximation of the average relative speed between mobile nodes/groups than existing methods. It is also shown that the proposed metrics yield excellent performance when they are used to predict the inter-group inter-meeting times for networks that follow the Rereence point group mobility model and to estimate the packet delivery rate for those that follow the Random Way Point model.