Presence Information in Mobile Mesh Networks

Given a mobile mesh network, we attempt to address the question of which nodes are accessible at any point in time through some path from a given node. From the viewpoint of some node in the mesh network, we claim that it is impossible to deterministically infer which other nodes are still accessible through some path from the current node. By formulating the arrival of presence updates from various nodes in the network as a Poisson process, we introduce a probabilistic presence mechanism that offers user-defined levels of assurance on whether a remote node is still accessible and provide a distance metric for each node, based on the corresponding arrival rate of presence updates.