Modeling and Evaluation of Topological and Application Characteristics on Mobile Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The paper presents a simulation-based study of topological characteristics of a mobile wireless ad-hoc network, namely, connectivity, coverage and diameter. Knowing these characteristics of the network aids in design of new distributed protocols as well as in predicting the performance and robustness of distributed protocols running on the network. The nodes exhibit intelligent mobility pattern which aims to achieve required levels of the output parameter values. The nodes also have constraints on their transmission ranges and exhibit both transient and permanent failures. The first part of the study shows the behavior of the output measures with increasing number of nodes in the topology without regard to the traffic. Next, a distributed location determination algorithm is simulated on the network with a mix of mobile nodes and anchor nodes that have location information. Measures of one-hop neighbor connectivity and anchor connectivity relevant to the application are calculated with respect to the duration the protocol is allowed to execute. The study shows that with the given node transmission range and 20% anchor nodes, at least 28 nodes are required so that the average error in location information is less than 10%.