A Mathematical Method for Analyzing the Effect of Different Protocol Layers on Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

摘要

A mathematical model and method is presented to extract the route metric used by a routing protocol, if we can observe the route choices of the protocol. Moreover, this extraction can be done by an efficient (polynomial time) algorithm. This extracted metric is not necessarily the "declared metric" of the protocol, which is most often just the simple hop metric. The extracted metric contains, in a condensed way, the effect of all the other layers. Thus, it constitutes a mapping of the complex protocol stack into the routing protocol, which may be very useful when we want to analyze and assess the quality of a routing protocol as it works embedded in a protocol stack, rather than in isolation.