Delay analysis for symmetric nodes in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Different deployments of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can have widely varying characteristics that greatly impact the behavior of different routing protocols created for these networks. Before applications can be deployed in such environments, it is important for developers to understand the potential quantitative behavior of the protocols that support their applications. Analytical models exist to describe the behavior of MANETs, but they are restricted to simplistic statistical models that represent either node mobility or link connectivity individually without considering the interplay of the two and other important aspects of MANETs. Our previous work has begun developing an integrated analytical framework which considers the impact the physical environment, network characteristics, protocols' behaviors, and the applications' communication patterns have on performance. In this paper, we focus specifically on analytical model to account for the subtleties of message queueing in MANETs. Our analysis explains a delay of a data packet in a mobile node under homogeneous conditions in a node mobility and traffic. This resulting model is expressed with parameters which are obtainable from systems, application designers and a operating environment. We describe our system and derive the delay model. We validate our analytical result through network simulation and discuss potential limitations of the model and future works.