Connectivity, Percolation, and Information Dissemination in Large-Scale Wireless Networks with Dynamic Links

Abstract: We investigate the problem of disseminating broadcast messages in wireless networks with time-varying links from a percolation-based perspective. Using a model of wireless networks based on random geometric graphs with dynamic on-off links, we show that the delay for disseminating broadcast information exhibits two behavioral regimes, corresponding to the phase transition of the underlying network connectivity. When the dynamic network is in the subcritical phase, ignoring propagation delays, the delay scales linearly with the Euclidean distance between the sender and the receiver. When the dynamic network is in the supercritical phase, the delay scales sub-linearly with the distance. Finally, we show that in the presence of a non-negligible propagation delay, the delay for information dissemination scales linearly with the Euclidean distance in both the subcritical and supercritical regimes, with the rates for the linear scaling being different in the two regimes.