The UDel Models-MANET Mobility and Path Loss in an Urban / Suburban Environment

It is well known that mobility plays an important role in the performance of MANET protocols. Investigations of the impact of physical layer indicates that the physical layer also plays an important role. This paper presents tools for modeling the environment for MANETs. This environment is defined in terms of buildings, offices, hallways, sidewalks, and roads. Within this environment, the movements of pedestrians, cars, and helicopters/UAVs are modeled. Tightly coupled to the modeled environment is a model of the behavior of links, in particular, the path loss. The mobility is composed of different types of mobility models including graph-based random waypoint and graph-based random walk. The path loss is found with a mixture of beam tracing and an attenuation factor model. The path loss model accounts for reflections from the walls of buildings as well as the penetration into and out of buildings. This paper also includes some illustrative examples of propagation and briefly looks at the impact of these models on the performance of MANET routing protocols. The tool developed is compatible with the QualNet simulator (after a small change) and is available for download.