Formal Modeling of BeeAdHoc: A Bio-inspired Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocol

Design and development of routing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is an active area of research. The standard practice among researchers working in this emerging domain is to evaluate the performance of their routing protocols in a network simulator. It is now a well known fact that the simulation studies are scenario specific and hence their results can not be generalized. In this paper, we present mathematical models of two key performance metrics, routing overhead and route optimality, of BeeAdHoc MANET routing protocol. One of the key components of our BeeAdHoc model is the collision model at Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. The mathematical expressions of the performance metrics provide valuable insight about the behavior of BeeAdHoc in particular, and a typical ad hoc routing protocol in general, without resorting to scenario specific time consuming simulations.