On the Effect of Link Break Problem on Routing Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Wireless ad hoc networks are an emerging and popular technology to the world. However, the benefits of them are actually their fragility, too. Owing to mobile node movements, the link break problem always occurs in the network. The problem greatly influences the throughput, delay, jitter, and lots of performance issues of a routing protocol. Many articles provide these performance issues. However, they did not trace the causes. From a different point of view, this article explores the main reason, i.e., link break problem. This article is proposed to evaluate the influence of link break problem on two categories of most popular routing protocols, i.e., table-driven and on-demand routing protocols. This article briefly discusses the main differences, building up mathematical models, setting up simulation environment, running the simulation, and finally presenting the simulation results and analyzing the performance. We found that the update probability of table-driven routing protocols increase exponentially with the number of mobile nodes and linearly with moving speed but not influenced by data traffic. On the contrary, the update probability of on-demand routing protocol increase linearly with the number of mobile nodes, moving speed, and data traffic. We conclude that the effect of link break problem on table-driven routing protocols is much more serious than that of on-demand routing protocols. This will be testified in Sections 4 and 5.