Multicast Delivery Delay in General Two-Hop Relay MANETs
Multicast delivery delay, the time a packet experiences from source to its destinations, serves as a fundamental performance metric in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, the multicast delivery delay is still largely unknown by now stunting the application of such networks. This paper studies the multicast delivery delay performance based on a general two-hop relay algorithm with cooperative probability p, packet redundancy f and multicast fanout g, where a same packet may deliver to at most f distinct relay nodes, and then these relay nodes can forward the packet to its g destination nodes. Specifically, the destination nodes may also forward the packet for each other with cooperative probability p. We first develop a Markov chain model to capture the complex packet delivery process under the general two-hop relay algorithm in MANETs. With the help of the theoretical model, we then derive an analytical expression for the expected multicast delivery delay.