The Influence of Link Break on Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

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 movement, 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. Hence, 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 model, 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 but linearly with moving speed. On the contrary, the update probability of on-demand routing protocol increase both linearly with the number of mobile nodes and moving speed. We conclude that the effect of link break problem on table-driven routing protocols is much serious than that on on-demand routing protocols since the former has to maintain each link of the network but the latter only the links of a specific route. Table-driven routing protocols are not scalable; however, on-demand routing protocols are.