Link Dynamics and Protocol Design in a Multihop Mobile Environment

Abstract

A multihop ad hoc network with mobile elements is considered. A model is created and analytic expressions derived to characterize the statistics for link lifetime, new link interarrival time, link breakage interarrival time, and link change interarrival time. Applications of these expressions to protocol design are discussed. As an example application, the link model is used to find an optimal balance between reactive and proactive routing strategies. It is shown that, when control traffic generated through proactive route updating is matched to link lifetimes, control traffic is significantly reduced while the goodput and delay benefits of the proactive approach are retained