The Temporal Effect of Mobility on Path Length in MANET

Ad hoc network consists of a set of identical nodes that move freely and independently and communicate among themselves via wireless links. The most interesting feature of this network is that they do not require any existing infrastructure of central administration and hence is very suitable for temporary communication links in an emergency situation. This flexibility, however, is achieved at a price of communication uncertainty induced due to frequent topology changes. In this article, we have tried to identify the system dynamics using the proven concepts of time series modeling. Here, we have analyzed variation of path length between a particular source destination pair nodes over a fixed area for different mobility patterns under different routing algorithm. We have considered four different mobility models—(i) GaussMarkov mobility model, (ii) Manhattan Grid mobility model and (iii) Random Way Point mobility model and (iv) Reference Point Group mobility model. The routing protocols under which, we carried out our experiments are (i) Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector routing (AODV), (ii) Destination Sequenced Distance Vector routing (DSDV) and (iii) Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). The path length between two particular nodes behaves as a random variable for all mobility models for all routing algorithms. The pattern of path length for every combination of mobility model and for every routing protocol can be well modeled as an autoregressive model of order p i.e. AR(p). The order p is estimated and it is found that most of them are of order unity only. We also calculate the average path length for all mobility models and for all routing algorithms.