Analysis of link lifetime in wireless mobile networks

Link lifetime (LL) analysis is crucially important in designing and evaluating wireless mobile network protocols. Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted on this issue, the current paper studies several aspects of link lifetime for the first time, e.g. a closed form expression for the probability distribution of the residual link lifetime (RLL) for the constant velocity mobility model is obtained, which facilitates marginal studies on the behavior of link lifetime. As a case, using a tail analysis of LL and RLL distributions, we analytically prove that they are heavy-tailed. Using this outcome, a self-similar behavior in the traffic pattern of a sample delay tolerant network is justified analytically. To extend the model, the effect of stationary nodes, the effect of buffer zone, and the effect of link establishment policies between different node categories on the link lifetime are investigated. Extensive simulation experiments are performed to validate the obtained analytical results and derivations precisely. Moreover, simulation results confirm that the analytic results can also be used for two well known mobility models (random waypoint and random direction) with a negligible error.