Two Standards for Rigorous MANET Routing Protocol Evaluation

In this paper we look at issues with the simulation of generic mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols. MANET simulation-based research is an involved process driven by the scenarios used in the simulations. Scenarios must be properly constructed in order to be effective in evaluating the performance of generic MANET routing protocols. For example, in scenarios with a low average hop count, little routing is needed, and poor protocols might appear successful. On the other hand, in scenarios with a high degree of partitioning, many pairs of nodes have no usable route between them, and good protocols might appear unsuccessful. Many standards are needed to establish rigorous evaluations for MANET simulation research, from simulation scenario standards to random number generator standards to results analysis standards. We do not attempt to standardize all of these areas. We do, however, propose two standards that should be employed to ensure long routes are available and used in the evaluation of generic MANET routing protocols. That is, we qualify a simulation scenario to be used for rigorous generic MANET routing protocol evaluation, based on the scenario's average shortest-path hop count and its amount of network partitioning. We construct several simulation scenarios that meet our two standards, using example metric values for our two standards. We note that our method can be modified to generate scenarios with different metric values that a researcher finds appropriate