A comprehensive methodology to evaluate the performance of a cooperative wireless network

Abstract

Performance evaluation of a cooperative wireless communication network depends on several parameters.Many of the studies, in fact, take a limited number of performance metrics individually to reach a conclusion aboutthe performance of a network. Besides, in general, some performance metrics might be in conflict. Thus, ignoring thecombined effect of all performance criteria in the network may lead to an incorrect conception of the overall communicationperformance of the network. Therefore, in this study, a comprehensive evaluation methodology in terms of various metricsis proposed to calculate the performance of a cooperative wireless communication network deployment using a real terrainmap. The proposed methodology, based on desirability functions, is discussed in terms of signal quality, signal qualitywith hopping, average number of hopping, hopping duty, and deployment altitude. In addition to individual scores foreach performance criterion, an overall performance score is also obtained. Furthermore, the effects of the desirabilityfunction’s ambition factor, terrain characteristics, and connectivity requirement rate on the score are also presented. Thesimulation results show that the desirability function-based performance evaluation approach could support a flexibleevaluation as well as provide an agreement on the conflicting performance metrics.