Novel metric for performance evaluation of routing in MANETs

Mobility of nodes in mobile ad hoc network constitutes a big challenge in the design of efficient routing protocol. Such issues reside in frequent and unpredictable links failure, which impact the overall network performance. Research community has proposed several scenarios to minimize the impact of mobility and deliver the quality of service required by MANET applications. However, efficiency of routing protocols must be assessed before their deployment. Actually, routing performances are evaluated using four main metrics: latency or end-to-end delay, Throughput, Packet delivery ratio and routing overhead. The purpose of this paper is the introduction of two new metrics that are devoted to evaluate how well routing protocol act in case of link failure triggered generally by high mobility. The first metric is path change factor (PCF), which characterize mobility adaptiveness and the second metric is route repair influence (RRI) that represent the effectiveness of route repair scheme. In addition we implemented the new metrics using an AWK script that uses as input NS2 trace file format.