Packet Delivery Ratio/Cost in MANETs With Erasure Coding and Packet Replication

This paper studies the performance of a general two-hop relay (2HR)-(x, w, f) packet delivery scheme that combines both erasure coding and packet replication techniques in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Under this packet delivery scheme, a group of x packets is first encoded into w(w ≥ x) coded packets using erasure coding, and each coded packet is then replicated to at most f distinct relay nodes that can help to forward the coded packets to its destination node. The original packets can be recovered when x distinct coded packets reach the destination node. To understand the packet delivery process under the 2HR-(x, w, f) scheme, we develop a multidimensional Markov chain framework, and based on this analytical expressions on the packet delivery ratio and corresponding expected packet delivery cost are further derived. Finally, extensive simulation and numerical studies are conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the developed theoretical models and to illustrate our findings. Our results indicate that the replication parameter f should be carefully selected in order to obtain a high packet-delivery-ratio performance while maintaining a relatively low delivery cost.