MANETs are coping with major challenges such as the lack of infrastructure and mobility which causes networks topology to change dynamically. Due to limited resources, nodes have to collaborate and rely packets on the behalf of neighbors to reach their destinations forming multi-hop paths. The selection and maintenance of multi-hop paths is a challenging task as their stability and availability depend on the mobility of participating nodes, where paths used a few moments earlier would be rendered invalid due to ever changing topology. The purpose of a routing protocol is to establish and select valid paths between communicating nodes and repair or remove invalid ones.
As mobility rate increases, routing protocols spend more time in path maintenance and less time in actual data communication, degrading network performance. This interaction among mobility, topology and routing performance is usually empirically studied through simulations. This dissertation will provide a novel deep analytical study of the root cause of performance degradation with mobility. This is accomplished by, firstly, studying how mobility impacts durations of topology paths called Topological modeling. Secondly, analyzing how routing protocols adapt to topology changes in Adaptability modeling which identifies AdaptationDelays representing the time taken by a routing protocol to translate a change in topology to logical information used in path selection. Combining the results from these two studies, performance models of routing protocols are obtained, which later is used to optimize its operation. This study is applied on two tree-based proactive routing protocols, the Optimized Link State Routing and the Multi-Meshed Tree
