Investigation of random waypoint and steady state random waypoint mobility models in NS-3 using AODV

NS-3 has been one of the popular network simulator software for many years especially in research related to Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). In NS-3, there is provision of several mobility models including Random Waypoint (RWP) mobility model and Steady State Random Waypoint (SSRWP) mobility model. RWP mobility model suffers from the transition phase related imperfection. SSRWP mobility model overcomes this limitation of RWP mobility by allowing the steady state initialization states of nodes in terms of position, speed and pause time of mobile nodes right from the beginning of the simulation. As SSRWP mobility model avoids any requirement of warm-up (cut-off) phase of RWP mobility model, it saves a significant amount of time of warm-up (cut-off) phase as well as establishes a high level of confidence in results obtained due to absence of any subjective guess. In the present work, RWP and SSRWP mobility models have been investigated using AODV routing protocol and it has been found that a way to mitigate the misleading effect of the transition phase of RWP mobility model is to have a sufficiently large simulation time which results, to a good extent, in convergence of performance of RWP mobility model toward that of SSRWP mobility model.