The Impacts of Radio Channels and Node Mobility on Link Statistics in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Understanding link statistics in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is essential to design adaptive routing protocols and achieve desired network performance. While much attention has been given to the node mobility impacts, little has been done to investigate the influence of dynamic channel fadings and the joint effects of the interactions among radio channels, transmission range, node mobility and node-pair distance on link statistics. In this paper, we investigate the link stability and availability by using a distance transition probability matrix of a relative distance between two nodes. Our analysis takes the node effective transmission range R_e into account. The relative node movement is based on the Semi-Markov Smooth (SMS) mobility model [1] which captures the smooth node speed (V) transition and the radio channel variations in a small time- scale. We show that the PDF of link lifetime in MANETs can be effectively approximated by the exponential distribution characterized by the parameter V/R_e. Moreover, we And that the impacting factors on residual link lifetime are in the decreasing order of node speed, transmission range, node-pair distance. The analytical results are validated by extensive simulations.