Quantitative analysis of partition statistics and their impact on data replication in MANETs

Data replication is, indeed, a widely used redundancy scheme for improving data accessibility in distributed systems at the cost of increased storage space and communication overhead. In this paper, we study the performance of data replication under mobile ad hoc networking environments in the presence of frequent network partitions by analytical modeling and by statistical analysis of simulation results. In particular, we examine the statistics of network partitions for a number of mobility models, and we propose distribution models to approximate the size of the network partitions. We then establish the relation between the network partitioning pattern and the effectiveness of the data replication scheme, which could be used to dynamically adjust the degree of replication depending on the current network operational conditions, while optimizing the trade-off between storage and data accessibility.