Delay and resource analysis in MANETs in presence of throwboxes

This paper addresses the delay analysis and resource consumption in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) equipped with throwboxes. Throwboxes are stationary, wireless devices that act as relays, and that are deployed to increase the connectivity between mobile nodes. Our objective is to quantify the impact of adding throwboxes on the performance of two routing protocols, namely the Multicopy Two-hop Routing protocol and the Epidemic Routing protocol, in the cases where the throwboxes are fully disconnected or mesh connected. To this end, we use a Markovian model where the successive meeting times between any pair of mobile nodes (resp. any mobile node and any throwbox) are represented by a Poisson process with intensity λ (resp. μ). We derive closed-form expressions for the distribution of the delivery delay of a packet and for the distribution of the total number of copies of a packet that are generated, the latter metric reflecting the overhead induced by the routing protocol. These results are then compared to simulation results. Through a mean-field approach we also provide asymptotic results when the number of nodes (mobile nodes and/or throwboxes) is large.