Modeling and Analytical Study of Link Properties in Multihop Wireless Networks

The radio link between a pair of wireless nodes is determined by radio channels, transmission range, node mobility and node-pair distance, which form a set of random factors in multihop wireless networks. The properties of such radio links can be characterized by link lifetime, residual link lifetime and link change rate, which, in fact, have been widely used for network design and performance evaluation. In this paper, we take a new modeling approach that captures the dynamics of radio channels and node movements in small-scale. More specifically, distance transition probability matrix is designed in order to describe the joint effects of dynamic transmission range due to radio channel fading and relative distance of a node-pair resulting from random movements. We find that the PDF of link lifetime can be approximated by an exponential distribution with parameter characterized by the ratio of average node speed V̄ to effective transmission range R_e. To further understand the implication of link properties, analytical results are used to investigate the upper bound of network connectivity and the associated network performance is evaluated by extensive simulations.