On Quantifying the Effects of Mobility on Data Replication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, nodes move freely and network partition occurs frequently. To mitigate this problem, data replication is commonly used to increase the data availability and reduce the data access delay. However, most previous work assumed a particular mobility model and could not fully study the effects of mobility on data replication. In this paper, we quantify the effects of mobility on different data replication algorithms from various perspectives. The study is based on several metrics which are not limited to the average access delay and data availability, by including the geographical distribution of these values. Through extensive experiments, we study the effects of four typical mobility models on data replication, and identify the most suitable data replication algorithms under various mobility models.