Capacity, Bandwidth and Available Bandwidth Concepts for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In a wired multi-hop path, the concepts of end-to-end BandWidth (BW) and end-to-end Available BandWidth (ABW) are clearly defined and widely accepted as the capacity of the narrow link and the unused bandwidth of the tight link, respectively. This consensus has led to clever estimation techniques based on active probing measurements. However, these concepts do not apply directly to Mobile wireless Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) because the idea of a point-to-point link does not exist as an independent communication resource between a pair of neighbor nodes given the shared nature of the transmission medium and the random nature of multiple access protocols.