Relations among Mobility Metrics in Wireless Networks

In wireless network simulation analysis, researchers tweak mobility metrics, such as the speed or the pause time of the nodes, to get different stability levels of the network. Meanwhile, in theoretical analysis, link failure rate is widely used to model the stability of a wireless network. This paper presents an analysis of a simplified mobility model and shows that the link failure rate is positively correlated with the average speed of nodes in this model. Though this result is based on a mobility model with many restrictions, a simulation evaluation suggests that the result still holds in the popular random waypoint model and random direction model. Based on this observation, this paper also encourages the use of link failure rate as mobility metric instead of the problematic pause time in future practice.