The performance impact of traffic patterns on routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

As mobile ad hoc network (MANET) systems research has matured and several testbeds have been built to study MANETs, research has focused on developing new MANET applications such as collaborative games, collaborative computing, messaging systems, distributed security schemes, MANET middleware, peer-to-peer file sharing systems, voting systems, resource management and discovery, vehicular computing and collaborative education systems. The growing set of diverse applications developed for MANETs pose far more complex traffic patterns than the simple one-to-one traffic pattern, and hence the one-to-one traffic pattern widely used in previous protocol studies has become inadequate in reflecting the relative performance of these protocols when deployed to support these emerging applications. As a first step towards effectively supporting newly developed and future diverse MANET applications, this paper studies the performance impact of diverse traffic patterns on routing protocols in MANETs. Specifically, we propose a new communication model that extends the previous communication model to include a more general traffic pattern that varies the number of connections per source node. We study the performance impact of traffic patterns on various routing protocols via detailed simulations of an ad hoc network of 112 mobile nodes. Our simulation results show that many of the conclusions drawn in previous protocol comparison studies no longer hold under the new traffic patterns. These results motivate the need for performance evaluation of ad hoc networks to not only include rich and diverse mobility models as has been done in the past but also include diverse traffic patterns that stress a wide set of protocol design issues.