A unified model for joint throughput-overhead analysis of random access mobile ad hoc networks

An analytical framework is developed to study the throughput and routing overhead for proactive and reactive routing strategies in random access mobile ad hoc networks. To characterize the coexistence of the routing control traffic and data traffic, the interaction is modeled as a multi-class queue at each node, where the aggregate control traffic and data traffic are two different classes of customers of the queue. With the proposed model, the scaling properties of the throughput, maximum mobility degree supported by the network and mobility-induced throughput deficiencies are investigated, under both classes of routing strategies. The proposed analytical model can be extended to evaluate various routing optimization techniques as well as to study routing/relaying strategies other than conventional proactive or reactive routing. The connection between the derived throughput result and some well-known network throughput capacity results in the literature is also established.