Cross-Layer Performance Analysis of Two-Hop Wireless Links with Adaptive Modulation

In this paper, a cross-layer analytical framework is proposed to analyze the throughput and packet delay of a two-hop wireless link. The adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is employed at the physical layer and finite-length buffers is considered at the network layer. Firstly, we model the wireless channel as a finite state Markov chain (FSMC). Then, a method is proposed to calculate the steady-state output traffic distribution of the source node. Based on this, a modified queuing FSMC model, which utilizes the non-Poisson distribution of the entering traffic, is proposed to analyze the performance at the mesh gateway. The results of the performance analysis are discussed and verified by numerical simulations. In addition, the proposed analytical framework can be easily extended to multi-hop wireless networks