Delay modeling for broadcast-based two-hop relay MANETs

Understanding the delay performance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is of fundamental importance for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed applications in such networks. Despite lot of research efforts in last several decades, the important end-to-end delay modeling in MANETs remains a challenging issue. This is partially due to the highly dynamical behaviors of MANETs but also due to the lack of an efficient theoretical framework to depict the complicated network state transitions under such dynamics. This paper demonstrates the potential application of the Quasi-Birth-and-Death process (QBD) theory in MANETs delay analysis by applying it to the end-to-end delay modeling in broadcast-based two-hop relay MANETs. We first demonstrate that the QBD theory actually enables a novel and powerful theoretical framework to be developed to efficiently capture the complicated network state transitions in the concerned MANETs. We then show that with the help of the theoretical framework, we are able to analytically model the exact expected end-to-end delay and also the exact per node throughput capacity in such MANETs. Extensive simulations are further provided to validate the efficiency of our QBD theory-based models.