Employing the SI Network Model to Evaluate Network Propagation in Bluetooth MANETs
Ian S. Riley, Rose Gamble · 2018
In any network application, devices must reliably send information to and receive information from other devices on the network. This reliability has proven to be challenging with Bluetooth mobile ad-hoc networks, or MANETs, because the topology of the network can change unpredictably. To provide reliable network propagation, applications must account for the geophysical constraints unique to Bluetooth MANETs, factors such as the geolocation of the devices in the network, limited communication range, and discovery latency. This has led to the development of communication protocols to overcome these challenges. However, no protocol can guarantee reliable network propagation across all network conditions. In this paper, we define a SI model that can predict the network coverage of a Bluetooth MANET with predefined network conditions. The SI model is a weighted, fully-connected, directed graph which contains edge probabilities which represent the likelihood of two devices sharing a message. We construct a virtual simulation which emulates the behavior of a Bluetooth MANET by simulating the discovery processes of the devices, their connection behavior, and their physical movement within a predefined space. The SI model and the simulation are compared across a variety of scenarios, each with their own unique set of initial conditions. The results of this presentation show that a SI model can be used to adequately model the asymptotic percent network coverage of a Bluetooth MANET and that it can model network conditions that would be infeasible to measure with a physical or virtual simulation.