INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS Int. J. Commun. Syst. (2012) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/dac.2363 Performance study of a wireless mobile ad hoc network with orientation-dependent internode communication scheme Alexander Kostin 1 , Gurcu Oz 2, * ,† and Huseyin Haci 3 1 Girne American University, Girne, North Cyprus 2 Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus 3 University of Kent, UK SUMMARY A Petri-net-based simulation model of a wireless mobile ad hoc network is developed and studied. The model covers all the fundamental aspects of behaviour of such a network and uses a novel scheme of orientation-dependent (or sector-dependent) internode communication, with random states of links. The proposed scheme enables representation of reliability aspects of wireless communication, such as fading effects, interferences, presence of obstacles and weather conditions in a general and rather easy way. The simulation model was implemented in terms of a class of extended Petri nets to explicitly represent paral- lelism of events and processes in the WLAN as a distributed system. In the simulation, the behaviour of four fundamental performance metrics — packet delivery ratio, average number of hops, relative network traffic and end-to-end delay — were investigated with varying distance of transmission and different combinations of model parameters. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 14 March 2011; Revised 6 February 2012; Accepted 1 April 2012 KEY WORDS: mobile wireless ad hoc networks; oriented links; simulation; extended Petri nets 1. INTRODUCTION In comparison with wired computer networks that have a sufficiently long history and represent a mature technology, wireless ad hoc networks, being relatively new, are understood much less and, despite many studies, still require more research to develop efficient and practically feasible schemes and methods of their use in different application areas. There are two main directions to investigate wireless ad hoc networks. The first direction is exper- imental studies of such networks deployed in real-world environments [1]. Giving very valuable information about actual characteristics of ad hoc networks, this approach requires large resources, long time and many participants. The second direction is simulation modelling. This way requires fewer resources and allows to investigate the behaviour and characteristics of ad hoc networks with an arbitrary large number of mobile nodes and any desired combination of parameters [2]. A number of simulation packages have been developed to conduct this form of investigation of computer networks, such as NS2 and Opnet [3, 4]. Simulation study of networks has also its own problems and challenges. Before starting to develop a simulation model of an ad hoc network, the modeller should choose a sufficiently realistic node mobility model, specify a scheme of internode communication and determine and justify perfor- mance metrics to be derived from raw simulation data. Representation of node mobility is a highly *Correspondence to: Gurcu Oz, Department of Computer Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus, via Mersin 10, Turkey. † E-mail: gurcu.oz@emu.edu.tr Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.