PERFORMANCE OF WIRELESS AD HOC NETWORKS

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