On Delivery Delay-Constrained Throughput and End-to-End Delay in MANETs

The real achievable performance of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), in particular the performance of such networks under practical constraints, is still largely unknown by now. As a step forward in this direction, this paper focuses on a MANET where a maximum allowed delivery delay is imposed to each packet and examines the impact of such delivery delay constraint on its real achievable performance in terms of throughput and packet end-to-end delay. We first determine the throughput capacity of the MANET to reveal the maximum possible throughput the network can support. For a given exogenous rate to each node, we then provide analysis on the achievable throughput, packet delivery ratio and packet end-to-end delay, and show how they are determined by the steady state of relay queues in the network. For the analysis of steady state of relay queues, we further develop a subtle Markov chain model based on the idea of state reduction such that state space explosion problem in the analysis can be avoided. Finally, numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the network and the impact brought by the delivery delay constraint.