When Buildings Blur the Lines: Revealing the Hidden Performance Equivalences in MANET Routing Protocols

The study finds that in urban environments, the performance of non-cross-layer routing protocols (AODV, OLSR, DSDV) becomes nearly identical, contradicting earlier research that ranked their effectiveness. Using a new building-aware loss model in ns-3, we show that realistic urban conditions, unlike traditional open-field models, cause end-to-end delay to increase up to tenfold, with high variability due to unstable links. We also investigate whether adjusting parameters in open-field models could mimic urban connectivity. While this tuning matched some network connectivity metrics, it failed to replicate more complex concepts linked with propagation dynamics of cities, proving that open-field models cannot accurately simulate urban networks without fundamental changes.