Delay performance of different MAC schemes for multihop wireless networks

This paper studies the end-to-end (e2e) delay performance of a multihop wireless network fed with a single constant bit rate (CBR) source. Two MAC schemes are investigated, m-phase TDMA and probabilistic slotted ALOHA. A delay model is used to analyze the resulting tandem queueing system and derive tight upper bounds on the delay mean. The e2e delay linearly increases with the route length and its distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution. For channels with reception probability greater than 0.5, TDMA significantly outperforms ALOHA. For unreliable channels, the situation is less clear