On the overhead of ad hoc routing protocols with finite buffers

An analytical approach to quantifying the routing overhead in wireless ad hoc networks is presented in this paper. We find that in addition to the traditional control overhead and sub-optimal routing overhead, the retransmissions of discarded packets due to buffer overflow in receiver nodes on a route will consume extra bandwidth, which increasing the routing overhead. In this paper, we focus on the impact of packet loss process, analytical expressions for routing overhead and minimal packet loss rate are also derived. A simulation comparing retransmission-aware routing and a hypothetical optimal reactive routing protocol is used as a supplement of our theory, which shows that there still has a great potential to reduce the overhead to improve the network capacity.