A Hierarchical Model for Mobile Ad Hoc Network Performability Assessment

Dynamic topology is one of the main influence factors on network performability. However, it was always ignored by the traditional network performability assessment methods when analyzing large-scale mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) because of the state explosion problem. In this paper, we address this problem from the perspective of complex network. A two-layer hierarchical modeling approach is proposed for MANETs performability assessment, which can take both the dynamic topology and multi-state nodes into consideration. The lower level is described by Markov reward chains (MRC) to capture the multiple states of the nodes. The upper level is modeled as a small-world network to capture the characteristic path length based on different mobility and propagation models. The hierarchical model can promote the MRC of nodes into a state matrix of the whole network, which can avoid the state explosion in large-scale networks assessment from the perspective of complex network. Through the contrast experiments with OPNET simulation based on specific cases, the method proposed in this paper shows satisfactory performance on accuracy and efficiency.