2015 Advances in Wireless and Optical Communications (RTUWO)

Impacts of OPNET Physical Layer Modelling

on LANDY Routing Protocol
Adam Macintosh
macintoa@lsbu.ac.uk

BiMEC, Dept. of Engineering & Design, London South Bank University, London, SE1 0AA, UK

Abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the impacts

of OPNET physical layer modelling on our proposed MANET
routing protocol LANDY. And to assess how the data load
impacts the routing protocol performance under two different
physical layer environments, and two different mobility models
(Gauss-Markov Model, and Reference Point Group Model). In
this study, LANDY, DSR, GPSR, OLSR are used as the routing
protocols (Position based, Reactive, and Proactive) with default
settings. OPNET simulator was used to design and build a
unified simulation environment; to evaluate the performance of
the different protocols proposed in the IETF, in different
scenarios.

interference propagation pathloss, and signal reception [6, 8,

11]. Most common model in published reports on MANET
routing protocols is unit disk graph. It is very simplistic and
idealistic models where the radio transmission range shapes a
perfect circle. Another common model is free space
propagation. It assumes that the transmitter and the receiver
have a clear line-of-sight. Therefore, the received signal
strength depends on distance only [9, 13]. Additionally, a
successful data transmission over a link might not be the same
or guarantee the delivery for the next data packet transmission
if the environmental conditions fluctuate [1, 5, 9].
II. RELATED WORKS

Keywords Mobile Ad hoc network, Mobility Models, Mobility

Impacts, Connectivity, OPNET.

I.

INTRODUCTION

It is important to explore the physical layer and the impact

on the performance of MANET routing protocol. The Open
Systems Interconnection model (OSI) is a theoretical
model that describes and standardizes the core process of
a communication system by dividing it into layers [1, 2]. The
Physical layer is layer 1 in the network stack. The
functionalities of the physical layer are to define physical and
electrical characteristics, provide modulation and coding
schemes in the wireless medium.
The Data link layer is layer 2, which is divided into two
sublayers, Logic Link Control (LLC) and MAC. The LLC
sublayer provides interface to the upper layer and error
control. The MAC sublayer defines medium access
mechanism to the shared wireless medium. The network layer
is layer 3, which provides the functional and procedural means
of transferring datagrams from source node to the target node
connected to the network.
The physical layer model has a major impact on the
performance MANET routing protocols [1, 5, 8]. Due to fact
that, the wireless channel is subject to noise, multipath fading,

978-1-4673-7431-6/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

Extensive research has been done in modelling mobility for

MANETs and many mobility models have been proposed in
the literature [3, 4, 7, 13]. Much of the initial research was
based on using random waypoint RWP as the underlying
mobility model and Constant Bit Rate as the traffic pattern.
A Study Stojmenovic, Ivan, et al. [9] investigated the
impact of physical layer on the design and performance of
routing and broadcasting protocols in ad hoc and sensor
networks. Dricot, J. et al. [3] studied the impact of the physical
layer on the performance of indoor wireless networks. Paper
[10], investigated the effects of wireless physical layer
modeling under different simulation tools.
A comprehensive analysis has been carried out on the
impact of physical layer modelling on MANET routing
protocols and evaluate how data load impacts the routing
protocol performance under two different physical layer
environments, and two different mobility models (GaussMarkov Model, and Reference Point Group Model).This
research is significant in practice for the simulation study of
MANET routing protocols and the design and improvement of
mobility models.
III. LOCAL AREA DYNAMIC ROUTING PROTOCOL
In the previous work, Local Area Dynamic Routing
Protocol (LANDY) [8, 14] localises routing information
distribution in the one-hop range. Thus LANDY Figuer.1 will
reduce the control overhead, simplify routing computation and

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save memory storage.

Each MN in the network needs to maintain the local status
of its MNs neighbours only. For each connection, a MN gets
order of query packets.
The number of neighbor MNs may increase or decrease
based on the movement of MNs within the local region.
Therefore the distribution of the MNs within a region for the
network state is S(n) in the worst case scenario. Therefore, the
differences LANDY has to other protocols, are it uses the
locomotion prediction technique to estimate the future node
position. It uses the locomotion instead of the current position
to find the MNs locomotion trajectory to predict the future
position of MN, which reduces the impact of the inaccuracy of
neighbours positions on the routing performance.
It avoids routing loop or routing failure using the back track
process and the recovery process. It uses local locomotion to
determine packets next hop, and this increases the scalability
of routing protocol. Recovery with LANDY is much faster
than with other location protocols, which use mainly greedy
algorithms such as GPSR.
No signalling or configuration of the intermediate node is
required after failure. It allows sharing of the locomotion and
velocity information among the nodes through locomotion
table. It uses backtrack process to the previous node (up to
three nodes), for alternative paths before it switches to the
recovery process.

Figure 1. LANDY algorithm

IV. OPNET PHYSICAL MODELLING

OPNET is a commercial tool from OPNET Technologies
Inc. for modelling and simulation of communications
networks, devices, and protocols. It has being developed since
1986, and it is widely recognised to be the state-of-the-art in
network simulation.
It is really important to investigate the physical layer
modelling for OPNET simulator since we are using the tool to
simulate MANET routing protocols. OPNET uses free space
pathloss model without fading model. OPNET defines the
signal reception level by BER based model or SNR if the
threshold value is specified. The software comprises several
tools and is divided in several parts
OPNET Modeler
OPNET Planner
Model Library
Analysis tool
OPNET internal architecture is organized in a hierarchical
structure. The lowest level is customizable. Process models
are designed as a finite state machines. State and transitions
can be graphically specified using STD (state-transition
diagrams), and the status of each state is programmed with
Proto-C. Process models are then configured with menus and
organized into data flow diagrams that represent nodes by
using the graphical node editor.
Utilising the graphical network editor, nodes and links are
selected to build up the topology of a network. The Analysis
tool offers a graphical interface to view and change the data
gathered throughout the simulation runs, and results can be
analysed for any network element.
For performance evaluation from application layer
perspective, OPNET Planner is used to allow administrators to
evaluate the performance of the simulation scenarios without
programming or compiling. Models such as planner analyzes
and performance by discrete-event simulations are built using
a graphical interface. Also, new models can be defined.
Therefore, user have the option to chooses pre-defined
models (from the physical layer to the application) from the
library and sets attributes or define a new models (MIL3's
modelling service). The wireless module of OPNET comes
with the essential modules in terms of mobility and radio
propagation models, as well as in terms of full protocol stack.
Over-all summary of OPNET's features, OPNET is a wellestablished and highly professional product.
V. OPNET SIMULATION SETUP AND RESULTS
Two studies were conducted using the OPNET network
simulator. The purpose of the first scenario is to assess how
the data load impacts the routing protocol performances in two
physical layer environments. In this study, LANDY, DSR,
GPSR, OLSR are used as the routing protocols with default
settings. In this scenario, all the nodes can randomly sent data
to any destination within the network. Each scenario run is

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executed for 600 seconds of simulation time and models a

network of 100 nodes in a 1500m x 1500m area.
The radio transmission range is set to 300m in order to avoid
the networks partition.
The radio transmission pipeline is based on free space
model. The second scenario has the same number of nodes and
two different mobility models GMM, and PRGM. The
nodes speed is varying between 0 and 30 m/s. In this scenario,
LANDY, DSR, GPSR, OLSR are used as the routing protocol
with default settings.
All protocols used in the two simulations e.g. MAC, IEEE
802.11 are the same. In both scenarios, a fixed mobile
transmitter sent a 512 bytes data packets to a specific MN each
second. Each routing protocol is run for ten different initial
network configurations.
The results are shown on Figure 2. In all scenarios, the
results obtained from the two power models are very different.
The constant line is for the OPNET original power model and
the doted one represent power model with path-loss. We
noticed the result is quite same when the nodes are close to
each other. But after 20s of simulation, as the node move away
from each other, the number of hops between the transmitter
and the receiver increase.
During this time, the traffic received by the nodes acquired
from models with path-loss and fading fluctuates from the
default OPNET model. Due to the power model more
accurately define the real state of the environment which
impacts the values of the signal for the target node. Therefore,
real performances of LANDY, OLSR, and DSR can be more
efficiently analysed.
LANDY perform better than DSR, GPSR, and OLSR. Due
to LANDY is able to choose more reliable route with the
OPNET propagation model. That is why the number of route
errors is much smaller under both models comparing to other
routing protocols. Also, we noticed excessive difference in the
two scenarios when the network load increase. Due to the
overhead generated by the protocols.
LANDY routing algorithm does not produce large amount of
overhead comparing to the other protocols, as the network
area is small in this particular case. Moreover, we observed
the computational overhead is high, when considering a MAC
layer especially in high node density scenarios. As the amount
of events and states increase throughout the simulation run.
Overall performance of LANDY remains high and
marginally decreases when implementing more accurate
models. As the medium access control layer decreases the
amount of collisions and interferers, the overhead needed for
computing the SINR is also decreased.
The additional overhead created by the MAC layer is hence
balanced by the complexity decrease of the physical layer
simulation.
The results of the average RREQ packet sent by each source
MNs are shown in Figure 3 for LANDY, GPSR, DSR, and
OLSR as a function of radio range in the 100-node scenarios,
respectively. The source MNs send RREQ at route discovery
and recovery process of route failure on both routing
protocols. Results indicates that, the higher mobility of MNs

result in increasing the production of RREQ in the network.

Which causes routing overhead.
With speed increasing more over head is generating in all
protocols. But LANDY and GPSR have less overhead than
OLSR, DSR. Also, by observing more simulation
experiments, shows that more than 60% of routing packets in
the network is created by the RREQ packet of MNs.
In general, the performance of OLSR and DSR drops with
increasing number of nodes set with low transmission range,
but LANDY and GPSR perform well comparing to OLSR and
DSR.
Although both noise calculation and longer physical layer
preamble decrease the RREQ values in all the scenarios, by
comparing Figure 4 -a, b, c, and d their impacts on the RREQ
performance degradation are quite different. Due to the IEEE
802.11 MAC retransmission restrictions, the consideration of
interference and noise massively increases the data packet
drops, as the accumulated power of interference signals and
noise can rise the chances of frame drops including MAC
control frames.
This will lead to reduction in the overall traffic. The
dropped data packets are not forwarded further to the targets
nodes, the increase in the packet drops at the MAC layer
decreases the overall traffic, resulting in the decrease in the
packet drops due to the outgoing queue overflow.
Results also shows that, the impact of RPGM on routing
performance is minimal, compared with GMM. Such
performance is due to MNs closeness, which restricts
movement to within a small area around the reference point.
As a result, link connectivity increases, leading to less
unidirectional links occurrences. On the other hand, MNs in
GMM are uniformly distributed.
Consequently, nodes are more vulnerable to form
unidirectional link. In addition, result shows with the speed
increasing, each metric is getting worse in some way.
These results exist since the topology of the network is
more unstable with the speed increasing. As a result of the
RPGM model only has pause time in simulation boundary and
the MNs need to keep moving in the same direction until they
reach the border of the simulation area. The metric in RPGM
model is better than that of GMM model.

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(a) DSR

(a) DSR

(b) GPSR
(b) GPSR

(c) OLSR

(c) OLSR

(d) LANDY
Figure 3. Average RREQ Packet Sent vs. Radio range GMM

(d) LANDY
Figure 2. Traffic vs. Load MANET Routing Protocols

(a) DSR

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Results indicate that performance of the routing protocols

varies over different mobility models. In addition more
coordinated movements of the nodes reduce the number of
control packets required to be distributed over the network;
and reduce the routing overhead.
In free-space model, even nodes far from the transmitter can
receive packets, which can result in less hops to reach the
target node in MANETs. Furthermore, since a big difference
outlined in both scenarios with the default model, more
experiments with others major routing protocols reactive or
proactive need to be carried out. It is essential to develop a
new statistics for better routing protocols performance
evaluation of others physical layer factors. Also it is important
to examine the movements of MNs in the real world, to
develop a new model that combines the best characteristics of
major MANET mobility models that can be used for
performance evaluation of routing protocols in MANET.

(b) GPSR

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(d) LANDY
Figure 4. Average RREQ Packet Sent vs. Radio range - RPGM

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VI. CONCLUSION
Our study results indicates that the factors at the physical
layer not only impact the performance of the routing protocol,
but it can even change the relative ranking between routing
protocols for the same environment.
Radio propagation models used in MANET simulation, are
limited to fading, path loss and shadowing. Fading is a
difference of signal power at receivers produced by the node
mobility or environmental fluctuations that generate variable
propagation conditions from transmitters.

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