Information dissemination in large-scale wireless networks with unreliable links

Abstract

We study connectivity and information dissemination in large-scale wireless networks with unreliable links from a percolation-based perspective. We first examine static models, where each link of the network is functional with some probability, independently of all other links. 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 exists in such dynamic networks, and the critical density for this model is the same as the one for static networks. Furthermore, due to the dynamic behavior of links, a delay is incurred for any information dissemination process even when propagation delay is ignored. We study the behavior of this delay and show that (ignoring propagation delay) 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. We then show that when taking propagation delay into account, the delay of information dissemination always scales linearly with the Euclidean distance between the sender and the receiver.