Connectivity and Latency in Large-Scale Wireless Networks with Unreliable Links

Abstract

We study connectivity and transmission latency in wireless networks with unreliable links from a percolation-based perspective. We first examine static models, where each link of the network is functional (active) with some probability, independently of all other links, where the probability may depend on the distance between the two nodes. We obtain analytical upper and lower bounds on the critical density for phase transition in this model. We then examine dynamic models, where each link is active or inactive according to a Markov on- off process. We show that a phase transition also exists in such dynamic networks, and the critical density for this model is the same as the one for static networks under some mild conditions. Furthermore, due to the dynamic behavior of links, a delay is incurred for any transmission even when propagation delay is ignored. We study the behavior of this transmission delay and show that the delay scales linearly with the Euclidean distance between the sender and the receiver when the network is in the subcritical phase, and the delay scales sub-linearly with the distance if the network is in the supercritical phase.