Studying vehicle movements on highways and their impact on ad-hoc connectivity

The mobility of the nodes in a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a crucial factor in the performance studies of communication protocols for these kind of networks. For this reason, researchers usually use a randomized node movement model, such as the Random Way-Point Model 6, in the process of designing or analyzing the behavior of their protocols. Since movement is not very predictable in these scenarios, they generally serve as a "worst case assumption" of node mobility concerning communication protocol performance in the sense that a positive correlation between performance in an RWP scenario and an arbitrary scenario exists. Additionally, RWP is an analytically well-understood mobility scheme and the movements can be generated very easily with tools complementary to most of the common network simulators.