S-Box: A Scalability Analysis Framework for Ad Hoc Routing Protocols

The scalability of routing protocols for ad hoc networks is a key design issue for achieving large-scale deployments of MANETs. This paper proposes S-Box, a "Blackbox" type scalability analysis framework. S-Box combines statistical Design Of Experiments (DOE) methods, empirical modeling techniques, and a newly proposed performance measure, called the scalability index. The proposed scalability index is able to quantify the overall scalability performance of ad hoc routing protocols by aggregating the values of multiple individual metrics into a single scalar value.