Packet delivery ratio and energy consumption in multicast delay tolerant MANETs with power control

Abstract

The packet delivery ratio and energy consumption serve as important performance metrics for delay tolerant mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where there are not continuous end-to-end paths between mobile nodes. Available these performance studies of MANETs mainly consider a unicast scenario, i.e., one source node has only one destination node, which cannot be applied to evaluate the performance of such networks under a multicast scenario, i.e, one source node has multiple destination nodes. Different from previous studies, the paper investigates the packet delivery ratio and energy consumption under multicast scenario with careful consideration of transmission power control issue for each node. To this end, we adopt a general two-hop relay RT-(f, d, τ, w) algorithm with redundancy factor f, multicast scale d, packet lifetime τ and power control parameter w for packet routing, where a packet at source node can be delivered to up to f different relay nodes, and each of d destination nodes may receive the packet from these relay nodes or the source node before the packet lifetime τ expires. In MANETs, each scenario has a fixed power control parameter w, which is the same for all nodes. Then we develop a Markov chain framework to depict the packet propagation process under the RT-(f, d, τ, w) algorithm. Based on this framework, we derive two analytical expressions for packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. Finally, simulation and numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis and to explore how the network parameters affect the packet delivery ratio and energy consumption performance.