Delay control in MANETs with erasure coding and f-cast relay.

Packet delay control in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is critical to support delay-sensitive applications in such networks. By combining erasure coding and packet redundancy techniques, this paper proposes a general two-hop relay algorithm 2HR- $$(x,\tau ,f)$$ for a flexible control of packet delivery delay in MANETs, where a group of x packets in source node are first encoded into $$x\cdot \tau$$ encoded packets based erasure coding, and each encoded packet is then delivered to at most f distinct relay nodes ( f-cast) that will help to forward the encoded packet to destination node. To understand the delay performance in a 2HR- $$(x,\tau ,f)$$ MANET, we then develop a discrete time multi-dimensional Markov chain model to depict the packet delivery process in the network, based on which closed-form results on mean and variance of packet delivery delay are further derived. Finally, extensive simulation and theoretical results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of our delay models as well as the capability of the 2HR- $$(x,\tau ,f)$$ algorithm in delay control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]