Range-based Mobility Estimations in MANETs with Application to Link Availability Prediction

The quality of communications in mobile ad-hoc networks is largely determined by the topological stability. Characterizing the mobility of mobile nodes (e.g. how often they move away from each other) would enable the measurement of the frequency of network reconfigurations for predicting stability. In this paper, we first define a triplet (V, ominus, psi) which consists of mobility parameters that are directly correlated with the stability of a network (e.g. inter-node relative speeds/orientations and epoch time). Based on our previous study on range-based velocity estimations, we then propose a new scheme to estimate the mobility parameters in realtime. In contrast to existing methods that are based on either localization systems or features of wireless channel, the proposed scheme estimates the parameters (V, ominus, psi) only from the time-varying inter-node distance information while retaining its reliability and accuracy even in noisy environments. The performance of the proposed scheme is validated in computer simulations against an existing method under different network settings. We also apply the proposed scheme to link availability estimation as a more lightweight way of obtaining mobility parameters using an existing tool. Preliminary results for various scenarios show that, with the proposed scheme, the tool achieved a comparable performance to when a priori knowledge of nodal mobility is used.