Studying the Effect of Human Mobility on MANET Topology and Routing: Friend or Foe?

Abstract

The better we understand human mobility the more capable we are to perform realistic simulations of human driven MANETs. By using this knowledge we can more accurately predict the performance that can be expected from real MANET implementations. In this paper we assess how recently discovered characteristics of human mobility affect network connectivity and routing performance. Our main results indicate that human-driven MANETs exhibit higher connectivity levels and longer route duration lifetimes than what was previously predicted with random waypoint simulations. These results encourage the development and implementation of MANET-based services, which so far have been regarded as very difficult or impossible to provide.