Performance study of a wireless mobile ad hoc network with orientation-dependent internode communication scheme

SUMMARYA Petri‐net‐based simulation model of a wireless mobile ad hoc network is developed and studied. The model covers all the fundamental aspects of behaviour of such a network and uses a novel scheme of orientation‐dependent (or sector‐dependent) internode communication, with random states of links. The proposed scheme enables representation of reliability aspects of wireless communication, such as fading effects, interferences, presence of obstacles and weather conditions in a general and rather easy way. The simulation model was implemented in terms of a class of extended Petri nets to explicitly represent parallelism of events and processes in the WLAN as a distributed system. In the simulation, the behaviour of four fundamental performance metrics — packet delivery ratio, average number of hops, relative network traffic and end‐to‐end delay — were investigated with varying distance of transmission and different combinations of model parameters. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This work proposes a novel inter‐node communication model that represents reliability aspects of wireless communications, such as fading effects, interference, presence of obstacles and weather conditions, in a general and more realistic way. According to this model, each node has a number of orientation‐dependent communication links, with random change of link states in time for each direction.