Throughput Analysis of Wireless Multi-hop Chain Networks

It is important but challenging to understand the throughput performance in wireless multi-hop networks. Most previous works show that the M/M/1 model is accurate enough for throughput analysis most of the time. However, we notice that without considering the interrelationship between the traffic on nodes, the M/M/1 model is quite inaccurate sometimes, especially on the typical chain topology. Therefore in this paper, we propose a model called traffic-analysis-based (TAB) for throughput analysis focusing on chains. TAB obtains the throughput by analyzing the state transition process of the chain as the traffic rate is increasing, based on the traffic interrelationships. Besides the throughput of each node, we also get two significant state transition points. One is the optimal sending rate of traffic, and the other is the lower bound when M/M/1 can be used. Simulation results show that TAB is much more accurate than M/M/1 when the traffic rate is under the second transition point.