Impact of mobility pattern on epidemic propagation in wireless networks

Abstract

The physical topology of a wireless ad hoc network has a great impact on not only the performance of the algorithms developed for such networks, but also on the robustness (i.e., vulnerability to attacks or node failures) of the network. In this work, an empirical study on the impact of mobility on the epidemic (e.g., worm) propagation is provided, where topology-dependent and independent mobility models are compared in terms of infection (compromise) propagation among nodes. Results show that if there is no node recovery (i.e., no patches), for some mobility models whole network can be compromised in a short amount of time with infection rates less than 0.01 for even sparsely-connected ad hoc wireless networks. If there is recovery an epidemic might arise depending on the infective time durations and infection rates.