Mobility and MAC protocols in MANETs

Abstract

The emergence of lightweight wireless mobile de-vices, like laptops, PDAs, and sensors makes mo-bile ad hoc networks (MANETs) an exciting and important research area in recent years. The MANET community have been concentrating on some problems related to the network layer, es-pecially on the routing protocols. But regarding the MAC level, little has been done. No novel protocol has been proposed but traditional wire¬less MAC protocols have been largely adopted. Our contribution in this paper is the deep inves¬tigation of the mobility impacts on MAC proto¬cols in MANETs, using the GloMoSim simula¬tion tool. We think we are the first who consider nodes' mobility when analyzing MAC protocols in MANETs.