A NUMERICAL STUDY OF LINK AND PATH DURATIONS IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

A theoretical analysis has shown that under a set of assumptions, the distribution of path duration can be well approximated by an exponential distribution when the path hop count is sufficiently large. The goal of this thesis is two folds: Using NS-2 simulations to (i) Investigate how fast the path distributional convergence takes place, and how quickly the inverse of the expected duration of a path converges to the sum of the inverses of the expected durations of the links along the path, and (ii) Validate the conditions under which the distributional convergence is established. Simulation results show that the convergence of path duration distribution takes place quickly (for path hop count larger than 6) for all eight scenarios. However, the ratio of the inverse of the expected path duration to the sum of the inverses of the expected link durations along the path does not get close to one for path hop count less than 12