Mathematical model on malicious attacks in a mobile wireless network with clustering

A mathematical model has been formulated for the analysis of a wireless epidemic on a clustered heterogeneous network. The model introduces mobility into the epidemic framework assuming that the component nodes have a tendency to be attached with a frequently visited home cluster. This underlines the inherent regularity in the mobility pattern of mobile nodes in a wireless network. The analysis focuses primarily on features that arise because of the mobility considerations compared in the larger scenario formed by the epidemic aspects. A result on the invariance of the home cluster populations with respect to time provides an important view-point of the long-term behavior of the system. The analysis also focuses on obtaining a basic threshold condition that guides the epidemic behavior of the system. Analytical as well as numerical results have also been obtained to establish the asymptotic behavior of the connected components of the network, and that of the whole network when the underlying graph turns out to be irreducible. Applications to proximity based attacks and to scenarios with high cluster density have also been outlined.