Estimating Reliability in Mobile ad-hoc Networks Based on Monte Carlo Simulation

Each system has its own definition of reliability. Reliability in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) could be interpreted as, the probability of reaching a message from a source node to destination, successfully. The variability and volatility of the MANET configuration makes typical reliability methods (e.g. reliability block diagram) inappropriate. It is because, no single structure or configuration represents all manifestations of a MANET. Thus, new methods should be developed to analyze the reliability of this new networking technology. In this paper we first introduce a simple technique for calculating reliability in MANET which is appropriate for small size of the networks. It is shown that this way is time consuming and costly in a larger network domain. Then, a heuristic method based on a Monte Carlo simulation is presented, which has less overall time consuming even for large size of the network. For a better investigation, the effect of network size (number of nodes) and probability of link existence have been studied and evaluated on network reliability for the proposed method