A Tandem Queueing Model for Delay Analysis in Disconnected Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc network routing protocols may fail to operate in the absence of an end-to-end connection from source to destination. This deficiency can be resolved by so-called delay-tolerant networking which exploits the mobility of the nodes by letting them operate as relays ac-cording to the store-carry-and-forward paradigm. In this paper, the authors analyze the delay performance of a small mobile ad hoc network by considering a tandem queueing system. They present an exact packet-level analysis by applying ideas from the polling literature. Due to the state-space expansion, this analysis cannot efficiently be applied for all model parameter settings. For this reason, an analytical approximation is constructed and its excellent performance has extensively been validated.