The TASEP: A Statistical Mechanics Tool to Study the Performance of Wireless Line Networks

We consider a multihop wireless line network with a single unidirectional data flow and show that by limiting the buffer sizes at the relay nodes to unity, the flow of traffic in the system can be efficiently regulated in a completely distributed fashion. Upon exerting this simple transmission policy, we find that the transport of packets in the wireless network is analogous to the flow of particles in the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP). Using existing results from statistical mechanics, we characterize the end-to-end delay and throughput performance of multihop wireless line networks for two different channel access schemes. Additionally, we apply our findings towards the design of long networks. This paper also aims at promoting the TASEP as a powerful tool for analyzing the performance of ad hoc networks.