Link Change and Generalized Mobility Metric for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Since the performance of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is strongly affected by the frequency of link change due to node mobility, there is a need to study thoroughly the characteristics of link dynamics. Link properties, such as link duration, link change rate and link availability, have been studied in several researches. However, they do not reflect thoroughly the network dynamics. In this paper, we propose a link property that reflects the network dynamics in generalized manner as it is independent of the mobility model assumed and the number of nodes in the network. We develop an analytical framework for calculating the probability of link change, including link creation and link breakage. And as a result, the probability density function of the distance between two nodes is also derived. There are many applications of the probability of link change in MANETs, such as network design, routing protocol optimization and network performance evaluation. As an illustration, we have proposed an application of the probability of link change in the previous paper as a generalized mobility metric for characterizing topology dynamics in MANETs