End-to-end delay in mobile ad hoc networks with generalized transmission range and limited packet redundancy

One of the challenging roadblocks stunting the development and commercialization of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), is the lack of a thorough understanding of the fundamental performance limits in MANETs. Distinguished from available works which mainly focused on deriving order sense scaling laws of the delay performance in MANETs and usually assumed a localized transmission range, this paper examines the MANET packet delay from a much more detailed perspective. Specifically, we assume for each node a general transmission power control such that the transmission range can be flexibly adapted and adopt a generalized two-hop relay with limited packet redundancy for packet routing. For a tagged traffic flow in the MANET, we first develop a theoretical framework based on two correlated FIFO queues to fully characterize the complicated packet delivery process. Then for any feasible traffic input rate there, we derive closed-form expressions for the corresponding expected end-to-end packet delay. Extensive simulations are further conducted to validate our theoretical results.