Affiliations: Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences,
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401-1887, USA. E-mail:
adoci@mines.edu | Department of Languages and Informatics Systems,
Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. E-mail:
fatos@lsi.upc.edu
Abstract: Simulation is a common approach for designing ad hoc network
applications, due to the slow deployment of these networks. The main building
blocks of ad hoc network applications are the routing protocols, mobility, and
traffic models. Several studies, which use synthetic models, show that mobility
and traffic have a significant effect on protocol performance. Synthetic models
do not realistically reflect the environment where the ad hoc networks will be
deployed. In addition, mobility and traffic tools are designed independently of
each other, however real trace data challenge that assumption. Indeed, recent
protocol performance evaluation using real testbeds show that performance
evaluations under real testbeds and simulations that use synthetic models
differ significantly. In this paper we consider jointly both real mobility and
traffic for protocol performance evaluation. The contributions of this work are
as follows: (1) demonstrates that real mobility and traffic are interconnected;
(2) announces the design and implementation of WIT –Wireless Integrated
Traffic–, which includes the design of a real traffic generator; (3) shows
that under real mobility and integrated traffic the performance metrics need to
be re-thought, thus we propose availability as a new ad hoc network protocol
performance metric; and, finally, (4) evaluates protocol performance under
synthetic and real mobility models with integrated traffic. We believe that the
results of our work constitute a step forward toward benchmarking of ad hoc
network performance evaluations.
