| Mobile wireless ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are being designed to be a key element in future battlefield communications, as well as a supplement to cellular networks. As a consequence of rapid changes in the topology of the network, routing packets in MANETs is a challenging task that has attracted considerable attention. However a comprehensive performance evaluation of routing protocols remains an open problem. This dissertation proposes a novel methodology for the performance evaluation of routing protocols for MANETs. The method is based on a "Divide and Conquer" approach and it provides a systematic and disciplined way to evaluate the performance of routing protocols. The full routing system is decomposed into components (subsystems). Performance models are developed for each component. Then, the performance model of the full system is the interconnection of the performance models of the components. The component based approach makes practical the performance evaluation of routing protocols, by allowing researchers to reuse a subset of the previous developed models to evaluate the performance of new ideas. |
