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Simulation studies have been the predominant method of evaluating ad hoc routing algorithms. Despite their wide use and merits, simulations are generally time consuming. Furthermore, several prominent ad hoc simulations report inconsistent and unrepeatable results. We, therefore, argue that simulation-based evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols should be complemented with mathematical verification and comparison. In this paper, we propose a performance evaluation framework that can be used to model two key performance metrics of an ad hoc routing algorithm, namely, routing overhead and route optimality. We also evaluate derivatives of the two metrics, namely, total energy consumption and route discovery latency. Using the proposed framework, we evaluate the performance of four prominent ad hoc routing algorithms: DSDV, DSR, AODV-LL, and Gossiping. We show that the modeled metrics not only allow unbiased performance comparison but also provide interesting insight about the impact of different parameters on the behavior of these protocols.