PERFORMANCE OF WIRELESS AD HOC NETWORKS

A wireless ad hoc network is a dynamic network formed on demand by a group of terminals without the aid of any pre-existing infrastructure. In ad hoc networks messages are often relayed from source nodes to destination nodes along multi hops. This multihop transmission improves the spatial concurrency of the network, but on the other side it deteriorates the multi-hop burden. Therefore, the network throughput per user decays with the increment of the number of users. This dissertation incorporates the Multi User Detection (MUD) technique into ad hoc networks to further increase the spatial concurrency by supporting Multiple Packet Reception (MPR). It presents a thorough study on network throughput via both analytical and simulation approaches. Additionally, terminals in ad hoc networks are often power supplied with limited battery capacity, which necessitates energy conservative routing protocols to prolong the network lifetime. This dissertation also addressed this energy conservation problem by proposing energy-aware and link-adaptive routing metrics for ad hoc network routing.