Real-world Environment Models for Mobile Network Evaluation

Simulation environments are an important tool for the evaluation of new concepts in networking. The study of mobile ad hoc networks depends on understanding protocols from simulations, before these protocols are implemented in a real-world setting. To produce a real-world environment within which an ad hoc network can be formed among a set of nodes, there is a need for the development of realistic, generic and comprehensive mobility, and signal propagation models. In this paper, we propose the design of a mobility and signal propagation model that can be used in simulations to produce realistic network scenarios. Our model allows the placement of obstacles that restrict movement and signal propagation. Movement paths are constructed as Voronoi tessellations with the corner points of these obstacles as Voronoi sites. Our mobility model also introduces a signal propagation model that emulates properties of fading in the presence of obstacles. As a result, we have developed a complete environment in which network protocols can be studied on the basis of numerous performance metrics. Through simulation, we show that the proposed mobility model has a significant impact on network performance, especially when compared with other mobility models. In addition, we also observe that the performance of ad hoc network protocols is effected when different mobility scenarios are utilized

Impact of Radio Link Unreliability on the Connectivity of Wireless Sensor Networks

Many works have been devoted to connectivity of ad hoc networks. This is an important feature for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to provide the nodes with the capability of communicating with one or several sinks. In most of these works, radio links are assumed ideal, that is, with no transmission errors. To fulfil this assumption, the reception threshold should be high enough to guarantee that radio links have a low transmission error probability. As a consequence, all unreliable links are dismissed. This approach is suboptimal concerning energy consumption because unreliable links should permit to reduce either the transmission power or the number of active nodes. The aim of this paper is to quantify the contribution of unreliable long hops to an increase of the connectivity of WSNs. In our model, each node is assumed to be connected to each other node in a probabilistic manner. Such a network is modeled as a complete random graph, that is, all edges exist. The instantaneous node degree is then defined as the number of simultaneous valid single-hop receptions of the same message, and finally the mean node degree is computed analytically in both AWGN and block-fading channels. We show the impact on connectivity of two MACs and routing parameters. The first one is the energy detection level such as the one used in carrier sense mechanisms. The second one is the reliability threshold used by the routing layer to select stable links only. Both analytic and simulation results show that using opportunistic protocols is challenging

Mobility in wireless networks

Abstract. This article surveys mobility patterns and mobility models for wirelss networks. Mobility patterns are classified into the following types: pedestrians, vehicles, aerial, dynamic medium, robot, and outer space motion. We present the characteristics of each and shortly mention the specific problems. We shortly present the specifics of cellular networks, mobile ad hoc networks, and sensor networks regarding mobility. Then, we present the most important mobility models from the literature. At last we give a brief discussion about the state of research regarding mobility in wireless networks.