Modeling Delivery Delay for Flooding in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can have widely varying characteristics under different deployments, and previous studies show that the characteristics impact the behavior of routing protocols for MANETs. To deploy applications successfully in MANETs, application developers need to comprehend the potential behavior of any underlying protocol used. In mobile networks, a major component of many of these routing protocols is some form of flooding, which facilitates message delivery over an entire network in a relatively reliable way. Several MANET protocols use flooding to support the distribution of route request messages as well as delivering broadcast packets. Therefore, to developers of applications for MANETs, a major task in understanding MANET protocols is estimating the performance of flooding in a given operating environment. In this work, we develop an analytical model for the delay experienced in flooding a message. We model the one hop delay of a flooding message in MANETs in terms of parameters that can be acquired either from a system configuration or from application designers.