Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols on the Reference Region Group Mobility Model for MANET

Group mobility is prevalent in many mobile ad hoc network (MANET) applications, such as disaster recovery, military operations, searching and rescue activities. Group partition, as an inherent phenomenon in group mobility, may occur when mobile nodes move in diverse mobility patterns and it causes the network to be partitioned into disconnected components. It may result in severe link disconnections, which interrupts network communications. To address this concern, we proposed a novel group mobility model in this paper, namely the Reference Region Group Mobility model, which can be used to mimic group operations in MANETs, i.e. group partitions and mergers. Based on this model, a comprehensive study on the impact of group partitions to the performance of network routing protocols are carried out by evaluating two well-known routing protocols, namely the Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing protocol (AODV) and the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR). The simulation results reflect that group partitions have a significant impact to the performance of network routing protocols.