Performance Modeling for Two-Hop Relay with Erasure Coding in MANETs

Among the "store-carry-forward" kind of protocols, the two-hop relay and its variants have become a class of attractive routing protocols for the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) due to its efficiency and simplicity. This paper focuses on the performance modeling for two-hop relay with erasure coding, a promising technique for improving the delay performance of conventional two-hop relay with simple replication. A general Markov chain-based theoretical framework is first developed to model the complicated message delivery process in such a network, based on which not only the mean value but also the variance of message delivery delay are derived analytically. The important medium contention, interference and traffic contention issues are carefully incorporated into our analysis, so the new theoretical framework can be used to precisely predicate the message delivery delay performance of two-hop relay with erasure coding, as verified by extensive simulation results.