Impact of mobility on the performance of ad hoc wireless networks

Previous work on mobile ad hoc wireless networks has primarily focused on studying the impact of node mobility on the performance of various routing protocols and the development of mobility models to represent node mobility. This is due to the traditional viewpoint that the main reason for degradation in network performance as a result of node mobility is due to the traffic control overhead required for maintaining accurate routing tables in the case of table-driven protocols and maintaining routes in the case of on-demand protocols [X. Hong et al., 2001]. Little work exists on the effect of mobility on fundamental communication and network performance metrics such as the bit error rate (BER) of a multi-hop route joining a source-destination pair, and minimum required node spatial density of an ad hoc wireless network for full connectivity. This paper discusses the impact of mobility on these parameters and points out their importance in real-life scenarios for average pedestrian and vehicular speeds. We quantify the effect of node mobility and message length on the BER of an average multi-hop route using a recently developed communication-theoretic framework for ad hoc wireless networks [O.K. Tonguz et al., Feb 2003]. BER of an average multi-hop route directly affects the ability of an ad hoc wireless network to support applications requiring a specific BER, for a given node transmission power and node spatial density.