On the repair time scaling wall for MANETs.

The inability of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) deployments to scale beyond about 100 nodes, in practice, has traditionally been blamed on insufficient network capacity for supporting routing related control traffic. This letter observes, however, that network capacity remains significantly underutilized by standard MANET routing algorithms at this scale of deployment. Therefore, instead of characterizing the scaling limit for MANET routing in terms of capacity, this letter characterizes it in terms of the interaction between the dynamics of path failure (caused by mobility) and of path repair. This leads to the discovery of the repair time scaling wall, which is used to explain the observed scaling limits in MANETs. The impact of repair time scaling wall on MANETs is identified, and techniques to extend the scaling limits are described.