Mathematical impact of information accuracy on network performance

Abstract

Many wireless network protocols have to deal with inaccurate information due to the lack of sufficient knowledge of the scenario or other limitations. Therefore, in this paper, we study information accuracy and investigate its quantitative impact on wireless network performance. First, we introduce an entropy-performance framework to model the relationship between wireless network performance and entropy, which characterizes the uncertainty of the input. Under this framework, we quantify the performance variations due to the availability of side information and find that the system performance improvement has a positive linear relationship with the amount of mutual information between input and side information. Subsequently, information accuracy is proposed to reflect the reliability of information. We show that information accuracy has a natural relationship with mutual information and we quantify the impact of information accuracy on wireless network performance. ©2010 IEEE.