Modeling Terrain Impact on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) Connectivity

Terrain affects connectivity in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). Both average pairwise link closure and the rate at which the link-state changes when nodes move depend on the characteristics of the intervening terrain. However, these key parameters depend only mildly on internode distances in common real-world terrains, which suggests that network performance in real terrains can be usefully modeled using simple time and location-invariant average link-state probability and rate of change. We use this fact to predict the number of disconnected subnets at a random instant in a given terrain, and we compare these predictions against Monte Carlo sampling of node positions.