Ultra Low Latency MANETs

While the capacity of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) has received considerable attention, the issue of endto-end latency has been largely ignored. As MANETs get larger and denser with an increasing number of end-to-end hops, the latency and jitter experienced by packets will be prohibitively high for existing and emerging real-time applications. We present and evaluate a design concept for achieving an order-of-magnitude latency reduction in large-scale MANETs. Our approach includes two key components: a relay oriented physical layer that uses cut-through relaying by pipelining the bits through the receive and transmit chains; and a path access control mechanism for reserving the floor multiple hops at a time. We present a rough numerical analysis of the relative performance gain from our ideas, complemented by a simulation-based analysis. Our study shows that, depending upon the parameters used, a 4x 10x reduction in latency over legacy systems is possible using the mechanisms described in this paper. Finally, we present some thoughts on implementation of our proposed system.