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.

Peer Reviewed