A study on the effect of traffic patterns in mobile ad hoc network

Abstract

The multimedia application through mobile Ad-hoc network is gradually becoming very popular. The traffic patterns of multimedia applications are quite different from the traditional data applications. The constant bit rate (CBR) traffic does not accommodate the specific features of multimedia applications. To characterize, the multimedia application, Exponential or Pareto traffic sources have been explored. The popular routing protocols for mobile ad hoc network were developed considering the Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic only. In case of multimedia traffic they do not work as expected. In this article, we have tried to study the behavior of mobile ad hoc network routing protocols considering Exponential and Pareto traffic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze the effect of traffic patterns on mobile ad hoc network routing. We have chosen the Normalized routing load and Packet Delivery Fraction as our figure of merit to compare various protocols. The Normalized Routing Load is high for both Exponential and Pareto traffic in Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The Packet Delivery Fraction is very high for Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol in all types of traffic patterns whereas it is less in Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) for both Exponential and Pareto traffic. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.