Study of the Effects of Mobility on Residual Path Lifetime in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, a communication path often spans multiple hops. Knowledge of the residual path lifetime may be quite useful in path selection algorithms, where the source node can select one of multiple paths to the destination node. In this paper, we study the effect of mobility on the residual path lifetime and demonstrate that the intuitive conjecture that “the older the path, the sooner it will break” is not always true. We observe that, for old enough links, the age of the oldest link of a multi-hop path is not significantly correlated with the paths mean residual path lifetime. Furthermore, this conjecture is also valid for other than the oldest link on a path. Additionally, we study the effects of mobility on the residual lifetime of a multi-hop path under different mobility models. Understanding of how the path lifetime behaves in a topologically dynamic environment may help us in designing an effective path-selection algorithm that selects the most reliable path among all candidate paths.