On the delivery probability of two-hop relay MANETs with erasure coding

This paper focuses on the delivery probability performance in a two-hop relay mobile ad hoc network (MANET) with erasure coding. Available works in this line either considered a simple extreme case of achieving the delivery probability 1, or assumed a simple traffic pattern with only one source-destination pair, or studied a very special MANET scenario (i.e., the sparsely distributed MANET) by assuming that whenever two nodes meet together they can transmit to each other. Obviously, such models cannot be applied for an accurate delivery probability analysis in the general MANETs where the interference, medium contention and traffic contention issues are of significant importance. In this paper, a general finite-state absorbing Markov chain theoretical framework is first developed to model the complicated message spreading process in the challenging MANETs. Based on the theoretical framework, closed-form expressions are further derived for the corresponding message delivery probability under any given message lifetime and message size, where all the above important issues in MANETs are carefully incorporated into analysis. As verified through extensive simulation studies, the new framework can be used to accurately predict the message delivery probability behavior and characterize its relationship with the message size, replication factor and node density there.