Performance Evaluation of Hop-Aware Buffer Management Scheme in Multihop Ad Hoc Networks

End-to-end delay and loss probability are two important parameters for evaluating the performance of multihop ad hoc networks. One of the main reasons for increasing the value of those parameters; is the buffer management scheme in the intermediate nodes. The number of hops that the packet traversed is not taken into account in most existing buffer management schemes. Dropping a packet which traversed a large number of hops; results in more retransmission overhead and therefore more congestion in networks than dropping a packet with a small number of hops. In this paper, we propose a buffer management scheme named hop-aware buffering (HAB). HAB is based on virtual partitioning of the buffer at each node according to the number of hops that the packets traversed from source to relaying node. The partitions are correlated and dynamically changed according to the traffic load. An analytical model based on a 4-dimensional Markov chain and simulation is carried out. The results show that HAB outperforms droptail in terms of end-to-end delay and loss probability.