Mobility affects routing protocol performance in a Mobile Ad Hoc NETwork (MANET). This paper introduces a novel concept of ''macro-mobility'' information obtained from the sociological movement pattern of MANET users, and proposes a routing protocol that can take advantage of the macro-mobility information. This macro-mobility information is extracted from our observation that the movement of a mobile user exhibits a partially repetitive ''orbital'' pattern involving a set of ''hubs''. This partially deterministic movement pattern is not only practical, but also useful for locating nodes without the need for constant tracking and for routing packets to them without flooding.
More specifically, this paper makes the following two contributions. First, it proposes an ORBIT mobility framework to achieve this macro-level abstraction of orbital movement. Second, to take advantage of this hub-based orbital pattern, it proposes a Sociological Orbit aware Location Approximation and Routing (SOLAR) protocol. Extensive performance analysis shows that SOLAR significantly outperforms conventional routing protocols like Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Location Aided Routing (LAR) in terms of higher data throughput, lower control overhead, and lower end-to-end delay.