2011 17th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC)
2nd – 5th October 2011 | Sutera Harbour Resort, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
A Performance Study of Various Mobility
Speed on AODV Routing Protocol in
Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MANET
Zahian Ismail
Kuliyyah of Information Science and Technology
Kolej Universiti Insaniah
Alor Setar, Malaysia
zahianismail@insaniah.edu.my
Abstract— Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a
dynamic network without fixed infrastructure due to
their wireless nature and can be deployed as multi-hop
packet networks. It is a wireless network and has
dynamic topology due to its node mobility. Networks
are being used in various areas and the demand of users
nowadays has motivated the emergence of the
heterogeneous MANET. Compared to homogeneous
MANET, heterogeneous MANET is more open to other
types of network for example wireless LAN, cellular
network and fixed network. In MANET, the concern is
more to configuration and one of the important
elements in configuration is routing. Ad hoc On
Demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one of the routing
protocols in MANET which can compromise with
MANET characteristics. The aim of this research is to
assess the performance of AODV in different mobility
speed for homogeneous MANET and heterogeneous
MANET through the simulation method. The
simulation scenarios derived from the HetMAN
architecture (as been discussed in previous work) have
been developed in the OMNeT++ network simulator.
The results achieved from the test have been evaluated
using the metrics assigned; throughput and packet
delivery ratio (PDR). The tests show that, as the speed
increase, the throughput and PDR decrease for both
homogeneous and heterogeneous MANET. From the
test also, we can conclude that the performance in
homogeneous MANET is better than in heterogeneous
MANET.
Keywords-components; Homogeneous MANET,
Heterogeneous MANET, Mobility Speed, AODV,
Throughput and PDR.
I. INTRODUCTION
MANET is a group of wireless computing devices
like laptop, mobile phone, Personal Digital Assistant
(PDA), or similar devices which can communicate
directly with one another without a central coordinator.
A MANET is an autonomous system of mobile routers
978-1-4577-0390-4/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Rosilah Hassan
School of Information Science and Technology
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
rosilah@ftsm.ukm.my
and associated hosts connected by wireless links. It does
not require a fixed network infrastructure due to its
wireless nature and can be deployed as a multi-hop
packet network both rapidly and with low expense [1].
MANET has its own routing protocols which can be
compromised with frequent route exchange, dynamic
topology, bandwidth constraint and multi-hop routing.
An ad hoc routing protocol is a convention, or standard,
that controls how nodes decide which way to route
packets between computing devices in a mobile ad hoc
network [2]. The routing protocols that are available for
MANET comprise proactive (table driven), reactive (on
demand) and hybrid routing protocols. Popular
proactive routing protocols are highly dynamic
Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) and
Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR) while
reactive routing protocols include Ad hoc On demand
Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing
(DSR). An example of a hybrid routing protocol is Zone
Routing Protocol (ZRP).
AODV meets the MANET requirements for
dynamic, self-starting, multi-hop routing between
participating mobile nodes wishing to establish and
maintain an ad hoc network [3]. AODV is an on demand
routing protocol, that is, it builds routes between nodes
only as desired by source nodes. It maintains these
routes as long as they are needed by the sources [4].
Nodes maintain a route cache and use a destination
sequence number for each route entry. The fact that a
node in AODV seeks information about the network
only when needed reduces overhead since nodes do not
have to maintain unnecessary route information while
the use of a sequence number ensures loop freedom.
There are two types of MANET [6];
 open MANET (heterogeoues MANET) and
 closed MANET (homogeneous MANET)
In previous work, we have design an architecture as
we call it HetMAN [7]. In HetMAN architecture, there
are homogeneous MANET and heterogeneous
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MANET. Open MANET has higher demands among
users nowadays because it is difficult to find a closed
MANET since users needs to get connected to other
networks to satisfy their daily needs like Internet
banking, online booking, e-marketing and others which
could be non MANET. Furthermore, it can give us
more opportunity to deal with the more realistic
problems than the closed one. Figure 1 shows the
HetMAN architecture.
Figure 1. HetMAN Architecture
In MANET, mobility speed, traffic and node
density are main network conditions that significantly
affect the performance of routing protocols [5]. In one
network scenario, different mobility speed might
produce different performance. This paper presents the
performance of AODV in different mobility speed for
homogeneous MANET and heterogeneous MANET through
the simulation method based on the scenarios derived from
HetMAN architecture.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
section II will discuss on the OMNeT++ network
simulation. The results and discussion will be in section
III followed by the future works in section IV. Finally
there will be conclusion in section V.
II. OMNeT++ SIMULATION
Objective Modular Network Testbed in C++
(OMNeT++) is a component based, modular and open
architecture discrete event network simulator which can
run on all common platforms including Linux, Mac
OS/X and Windows using GCC tool chain or Microsoft
Visual C++ compiler. It was released in 1992 and
publicly available since 1997 [8]. Although OMNeT++
was designed to be as general as possible, it is
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commonly used in simulation of computer network and
queuing network.
A. Simulation Environment
OMNeT++ has been used as a simulator to model
the scenario architecture. NED files store the relationship
between modules and the communication links which
can be modeled graphically. The files written in C++
represent behavior of the scenarios. They will tell which
network to simulate and hold the parameter setting of the
simulation. Simulation can be run in a graphical
environment or in command line applications.
There are several frameworks offered in OMNeT++
depending on the application or networks for example
INET, MiXiM, and Mobility framework. inetmanet is
forked from the INET framework which specializes in
simulation of ad hoc network. It provides the examples
and source code which is available for the development
of simulation application in MANET. It is easy to build
the application since the code can be reused and the
function can be imported. The OMNeT++ 4.0 and
inetmanet frameworks have been installed in the
Compaq CQ40 laptop with the Windows Vista 32-bit
operating system.
The simulation was performed using a setup that
determines the parameters of the simulation, for
example, the number of nodes, the routing protocol,
mobility types, etc. Table 1 summarizes the parameters
of the setup.
The simulation was done for three scenarios;
 Scenario I is node communication within
MANET
 Scenario II : node communication between
MANET and wireless network
 Scenario III : node communication between
MANET with wireless and wired Network
Scenario I represent homogeneous MANET while both
scenarios II and III represent heterogeneous MANET.
Simulation for scenario I involved 5 nodes which
had been set up as MANET’s nodes while scenario II
used 7 nodes; 5 nodes as MANET’s node and 2 nodes as
WLAN’s node, and scenario III used 8 nodes; 5 nodes as
MANET’s node, 2 nodes as WLAN’s node and 1 node
as LAN node. In this simulation, MANET’s nodes are
referred to as the host, WLAN nodes are referred to as
wireless and the LAN node is referred to as pc. Figures
2,3 and 4 denote the nodes’ simulation in OMNeT++.
B. Test Setup
There are three scenarios which were run in the
simulation. Each scenario was run 10 times for the
mobility speed test. Table 2 summarizes the tests for
each of the three scenarios.
 TABLE 1. PARAMETERS SETUP
Parameter Value

Simulation Parameters

Number of nodes 5, 7, 8
Simulation time 3000s
Playground Size 500m2

Routing and MAC Protocol

Routing Protocol AODV

MAC Protocol 802.11g
Mobility Pattern

Mobility Types Random Waypoint Mobility Model

Speed 1 mps, 5mps, 10mps, 15mps, 20mps
Mobility Wait
Time 0.1s
Max Hop Limit 7
Figure 3. Simulation for scenario II with 7 nodes
Communication Model
Protocol UDP
Packet Size 1000 Bytes
Radio Characteristics

Transmitter 2mW
Power
Transmission 250 meters
Range
Radio bit rate 54Mbps

TABLE 2. TESTS FOR THE THREE SCENARIOS

Packet Size Test

Constant playground size = 500m2

packet size = 1000 Bytes
Figure 4. Simulation for scenario III with 8 nodes
Variable mobility speed = 1,5,10,15,20 mps
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The result is gained after the experiments have been

conducted. The metrics considered for the simulation
results are throughput and PDR. The tests highlight the
performance of AODV in various mobility speeds for
homogeneous MANET and heterogeneous MANET.

A. Performance Metrics

Performance metrics are high-level measures used to

assess the overall performance of the network. It should
be constructed to encourage performance improvement,
effectiveness and efficiency. There are several metrics
always considered to measure the performance of a
network, for example throughput, end-to-end delay, jitter
and packet delivery ratio. As for the experiments which
had been carried out, the simulation used throughput and
packet delivery ratio (PDR) as the metrics.
Figure 2. Simulation for scenario I with 5 nodes
Throughput: Throughput is one of the dimensional
parameters of the network which indicates the fraction of

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the channel capacity used for useful transmission
selection of a destination at the beginning of the
simulation i.e., information whether data packets were
correctly delivered or not [9]. Furthermore, many
MANET applications benefit from increased throughput
[10]. Throughput is defined as the average rate of
successful message delivery over a communication
channel. This data may be delivered over a physical or
logical link, or pass through a certain network node [11].
Throughput = total number of packets received by the
destination node over a communication channel.
Throughput is measured in bits per second (bps).
PDR: PDR is the ratio between the numbers of packets
delivered to the receiver and the number of packets sent
by the source [12]. Packet delivery ratio can be defined
as:
Successfully delivered packets
PDR = ------------------------------------------------
Total number of transmitted packets
B. Simulation Results
Throughput: Throughput is the main performance metric
for the test scenario. It is a measure of effectiveness of
the routing protocol. Figure 5 shows the influence of the
node mobility speed on network throughput for the three
scenarios.
Figure 5. Throughput for scenario I, scenario II and scenario
III in 1000Bytes packet size and 500m2 playground size
Scenario I have 21% higher throughput than
scenario II and 38% higher throughput than scenario III.
The graph shows that homogeneous MANET has higher
throughput than heterogeneous MANET. According to
simulation for scenario I, II and III, the throughputs are
decrease as the speed increase because of packet loss.
Packet loss affects the throughput gain for the three
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scenarios. Packet loss is due to the highest routing
overhead when changing the node direction and speed.
The routing overhead also are increasing when the
number of speed average are increasing [13].
PDR: Figure 6 indicates the influence of the node
mobility speed on network PDR for the three scenarios.
Figure 6. PDR for scenario I, scenario II and scenario III
in 1000Bytes packet size and 500m2 playground size
Scenario I have 5% higher PDR than scenario II
and 46% higher PDR than scenario III. The graph
shows that homogeneous MANET has higher PDR than
heterogeneous MANET. The PDR for scenario I and II
are extremely higher than PDR for scenario III but
individually, the PDR for each of the scenario is
decreases as the speed increases. High speed mobility
causes the nodes to highly move and it effects the
packet transmission. Scenario III have more nodes
compared to scenario I and scenario III. The increase of
the number of nodes and node mobility speed causes
the collision during packet transmission which affects
the PDR value in scenario III. That’s explained scenario
III have very low PDR compared to scenario I and
scenario II.
IV. FUTURE WORKS
In the future, this work will tend to increase the
number of nodes so as to measure the performance of
AODV in different node mobility speed on the large
scale network. The future works could involve the
comparison of the AODV routing protocol with other
routing protocols like DSR, DSDV, OLSR or ZRP in
homogeneous and heterogeneous MANET. In addition,
we will try to use larger packet size with different
measurement to determine the performance of the
network in different packet size and node mobility
speed.
 Overall, this research shows that the performance
of the AODV routing protocol in homogeneous
MANET is better compared to heterogeneous MANET.
These tests prove that the current AODV routing
protocol is less adaptable in a wireless heterogeneous
MANET environment. Studies of the performance of
the AODV routing protocol can lead to the
development of an optimal enhanced AODV protocol
which can maximize routing performance, particularly
in heterogeneous networks and overcome the limitation
of the existing AODV protocol. It is possible to expand
the implementation of HetMAN architecture especially
to consider a cellular network in the work. If possible,
the testbed can be developed to extend the test for
homogeneous MANET and heterogeneous MANET.
The possible future works include the further
improvement of the AODV routing protocol to develop
an enhanced AODV which can match with the
characteristic of MANET and hopefully the new
AODV will improve the performance of routing both in
homogeneous and heterogeneous MANET.
V. CONCLUSION
AODV is one of routing protocols available for
MANET. It is on demand routing protocol which mean it
is reactive to the demand of the network requirements. In
this paper, we assessed the performance of AODV in
different mobility speed for homogeneous MANET and
heterogeneous MANET through the simulation method.
In the simulation, node mobility speed has a large impact
on throughput in wireless environment so as on PDR.
The result shows as the node mobility speed increase, the
throughput and PDR decrease. The studies of the
performance of AODV routing protocol hopefully can
lead to the new finding of a new optimal enhance AODV
protocol which can maximize the routing performance
and overcome the limitation of existing AODV protocol.
Overall, this research shows that the performance of
the AODV routing protocol in homogeneous MANET is
better compared to heterogeneous MANET. These tests
prove that the current AODV routing protocol is less
adaptable in a wireless heterogeneous MANET
environment.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research was carried out by the Network
Management Group, Faculty of Information Science &
Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).
For more details, please feel free to visit our website at
http://www.ftsm.ukm.my/network. Any opinions,
findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed
in this material are those of the authors. Special thanks
go to Mr. Zulkiflee Kusin for his valuable guidance on
OMNeT++.
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