The Ribosome Flow Model (RFM) describes the unidirectional movement ofinteracting particles along a one-dimensional chain of sites. As a site becomesfuller, the effective entry rate into this site decreases. The RFM has beenused to model and analyze mRNA translation, a biological process in whichribosomes (the particles) move along the mRNA molecule (the chain), and decodethe genetic information into proteins. Here we propose the RFM as an analytical framework for modeling and analyzinglinear communication networks. In this context, the moving particles aredata-packets, the chain of sites is a one dimensional set of ordered buffers,and the decreasing entry rate to a fuller buffer represents a kind ofdecentralized backpressure flow control. For an RFM with homogeneous linkcapacities, we provide closed-form expressions for important network metricsincluding the throughput and end-to-end delay. We use these results to analyzethe hop length and the transmission probability (in a contention access mode)that minimize the end-to-end delay in a multihop linear network, and provideclosed-form expressions for the optimal parameter values.
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