Metric driven mobility modeling in tactical networks

Abstract

Mobility management is a key aspect of designing and evaluating protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). The high mobility of nodes in a MANET constantly causes the network topology to change. Mobility patterns of nodes have a direct effect on fundamental network characteristics, such as path length, neighborhood size, and link stability. Consequently, the network performance is strongly affected by the nature of mobility patterns. While evaluating protocols for a specific MANET application, it becomes imperative to use a mobility model that is able to capture the movement of nodes in an accurate manner. The objective of this work is to produce mobility models that are able to describe tactical mobility in military applications of MANETs. We provide models of four tactical scenarios, show that these models are accurate compared to synthetic traces, and that when used to evaluate network protocols, they provide different conclusions than when using generic mobility models.

Building Realistic Mobility Models for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

“…Although not a battlefield scenario, Vijayavani and Prema (2012) [182] present a realistic world and mobility model based on a building (a health centre) with observed people movement patterns (nodes) within the health centre. Ray et al (2013) present a set of three models that is derived from published military tactics. Each of these models covers one specific military tactic rather than a complete modelling of a particular operation.…”

“…The need to map simulation models to appropriate MANET applications in order to gain meaningful insights into protocol performance is obvious and also well-documented, with recent papers including Kim et al (2011) [63], Aschenbruck et al (2011) [98], and Huang et al (2012). Ray et al (2013) specifically state that mobility management is important for protocol design and their performance evaluation, particularly realistic movement models (Krug et al, 2014, [99]). However, most mobility models used to evaluate wireless communication systems have limited resemblance to reality (Helgason et al, 2010, [100]).…”