A Node's Number of Neighbors in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Statistical View

Abstract

In the last decade, since the advent of advanced wireless technology, wireless mobile ad hoc networks have grown in both size and complexity, and their applications are also expanding at a great rate due to their many advantages, principally mobility and the fact that they do not require a fixed supporting structure. Security, routing protocols, and connectivity are major issues with mobile ad hoc networks, and seeking a solution to these and other problems is of great interest within the research community.All of these problems are affected by the number of neighbors that a given node has at a given time. In this paper, we examine the number of neighbors that a node has at an arbitrary moment during simulation time. We find that the interested number is not stuck with the node distribution or speed stable state but rather it fluctuates until converging after a period of time. Based on the results obtained from simulations, we have built a statistical model to grab a view of the number of neighbors each node has. Additionally, we have addressed some problems that are closely related to the average number of neighbors.