Sociological Orbit Aware Routing in MANET

Mobility affects routing protocol performance within a Mobile Ad Hoc NETwork (MANET). Past research on mobility models and framework was motivated by the need to provide a simulation platform for evaluating routing protocol performance via realistic scenarios. Mobility information of individual nodes has also been used to improve routing decisions (e.g., choice of next hop, link break prediction) in a MANET. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of integrating macro-mobility information obtained from the sociological movement pattern of mobile MANET users, into routing. The extraction of this mobility information is based on our observation that the movement of a mobile user exhibits a partially repetitive ‘orbital’ patten involving a set of ‘Hubs’ in practise. This partially deterministic movement pattern is both practical and useful in locating nodes and routing packets to them without the need for constant tracking or flooding. Leveraging this Hub-based orbital pattern, we propose a Sociological Orbit Aware Routing (SOAR) protocol. Through extensive performance analysis we show that SOAR significantly outperforms conventional routing protocols like Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Location Aided Routing (LAR) in terms of higher data throughput, lower control overhead, and lower end-to-end delay.