State analysis of Mobile Ad Hoc Network nodes

The importance of wireless communication systems for reliable mobile communications has increased significantly over the past decade. The dynamic topology offered by Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks provides flexibility and reduced time to operation. In this paper we analyze the communication of nodes based on their states and hop-count. The analysis is based on the Markov random walk model and we analyze the importance of hop count for efficient communication. This analysis is helpful to understand the hop count dependency in terms of the probability to reliably communicate to a neighbor node and other associated impacts. An analysis of the results is presented along with a discussion of reliability and scalability. Finally an Artificial Immune System based danger theory model incorporating hop-count is proposed to highlight current research. The importance of a hop-count metric as a security factor in order to identify a malicious node is also explored.