The Impact of Simulation Area Shape on the Performance of Ad Hoc Networks

The shape of the simulation area is critical in simulations because average hops of source to destination will change in different shapes. We measure one reliability metric (connectivity) and five efficiency metrics (round trip time, drop rate, energy cost, routing overhead and throughput goodput) in various shapes of simulation areas. Three routing protocols (DSDV, AODV and DSR) are carefully studied in different mobility patterns as well as speeds. Results show that DSDV performs the worst in most cases except in the case of round trip time. We prove that network efficiency metrics enhance when the reliability metric decreases. One exception is that the throughput descends when the horizon length increases. The key reason, we believe, is that the influence of network partitioning out-ranks the impact of network transmission condition improvement.