The hop count and path duration are the metrics, which are widely used for performance analysis of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). The paper proposes an analytical model to estimate the average number of hops in the path from source to destination and computes the path duration in multihop ad hoc networks. The work is analyzed by using the various design parameters like number of nodes, speed and transmission. The analytical results have been verified through extensive simulation results carried out in MATLAB 7.0. The results clearly reveal that expected hop count and path duration increase with the increase in transmission range and node density. However, the results at varying speeds show that these parameters are inversely related with the velocity of the nodes.

MANETs position-based routing, topology-based routing, GPS.