Abstract

Plenty of work was contributed in the field of protocol design and performance evaluation of multi-hop networks. It is generally accepted that mobility has a huge impact on the protocol performance; even more for multi-hop networks. Obtaining realistic measurements of mobility, however, is complex and expensive. Thus, we adopt virtual world scenarios to explore the mobility issue, by using the well-known multi-player game, Quake II. The advantage of the Quake II engine is that users move within virtual worlds under realistic constraints, whereas other mobility models may o#er insu#cient accuracy or operate under unrealistic assumptions. Moreover, it is very easy to create new virtual worlds and to adapt them to specialized needs. In this paper, we propose an analytical framework for mobility measurements in virtual worlds that could be adopted for the design of communication protocols. Our framework enables the study of the impact of mobility on connectivity and stability of the network, giving useful insights for improving communication performance. An interesting application of our approach is the analysis of coverage extension of so called hotspots or emergency situations, where the fixed network infrastructure is insu#cient or non-existent. In these extreme cases, multi-hop networks can be used to set up communication quickly. As these situations comprise a plethora of di#erent cases and scenarios, our model is appropriate for their analysis, due to its generality. We use our framework to investigate the performance of multi-hop networks based on IEEE 802.11a technology. In contrast to other contributions focusing only on connectivity, the IEEE 802.11a technology also considers multi-rate connections. Our framework covers the evaluation of simple connectivity as wel...

Citations