Impact of Mobility in Ad Hoc Protocol Design

Protocols in ad hoc networks are not designed with mobility in mind. Recent research reveals that mobility impacts all the layers of the protocol stack. Specifically, more realistic mobility models that are extracted from real user traces for the vehicular and pedestrian scenarios show that wireless nodes tend to cluster around popular locations. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, it suggests cross layer design, as a promising approach, in designing ad hoc protocols with mobility in mind. Therefore, it provides a survey of the methodologies used in wireless cross layer studies. Second, it presents a framework for cross layer and flexible ad hoc protocol design, which integrates mobility into protocol design.