Network availability modeling of VMIMO link in multi-hop wireless network

Cooperative diversity or virtual antenna arrays enables transmission range extension and provides performance enhancements in wireless Multi-hop relay networks, when compared with relaying non cooperative diversity based schemes. Moreover Cooperative diversity allows better reliability to link failure and lead to a more efficient transmission that is of particular interest in mobile environment. In this paper we present a quantitative approach to analyze the steady state availability analysis of a virtual antenna array link (VMIMO) subject to failures in a multi-hop wireless network using cooperative diversity and assuming Markovian properties. We propose an end to end VMIMO availability model enabling to express performance measure such as failure frequency and failure rate. These measures quantify failure impact on VMIMO link availability. Our model generalizes availability model given in [1] and may be exploited using the same approach presented in [1] to deduce survivability performance measures such that excess loss due to failure (ELF) and excess delay due to failure (EDF).