The Impact of Mobility Models on Geographic Routing in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks and Extensions – A Survey

Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWNs) emerge as an enabling communication technology, evolving rapidly due to the accelerating advancements and creating potential network applications that significantly improve the quality of life. Pure general-purpose MANET laid the theoretical foundation for MWNs, and many extensions are successfully deployed in commercial networks. This article surveys geographical routing protocols and mobility models applicable to MWNs and their recently proposed extensions. Mobility is a significant factor that profoundly impacts the performance of multi-hop geographical routing. This study analyzes various mobility models that significantly influence the performance of geographical routing protocols based on the characteristics and behavior of various network extensions. This survey investigates the primary challenges in designing geographical routing for various mobility models that notably impact the routing performance for a particular network extension. It also explores the enormous potential of geographical routing protocols under each extension and adequately addressing the routing and mobility-related issues. The essential factors that impact geographical routing, the freshness of location information, and the adaptive location update are examined extensively for various network extensions. Finally, the survey concludes with future research challenges and directions.