Design and evaluation of a metropolitan area multitier wireless ad hoc network architecture

Abstract

Few real-world applications of mobile ad hoc networks have been developed or deployed outside the military environment, and no traces of actual node movement in a real ad hoc network have been available. We propose a novel commercial application of ad hoc networking, we describe and evaluate a multitier ad hoc network architecture and routing protocol for this system, and we document a new source of real mobility traces to support detailed simulation of ad hoc network applications on a large scale. The proposed system, which we call Ad Hoc City, is a multitier wireless ad hoc network routing architecture for general-purpose wide-area communication. The backbone network in this architecture is itself also a mobile multihop network, composed of wireless devices mounted on mobile fleets such as city buses or delivery vehicles. We evaluate our proposed design through simulation based on traces of the actual movement of the fleet of city buses in the Seattle, Washington metropolitan area, on their normal routes providing passenger bus service throughout the city.