The last decade has witnessed a tremendous increase in both the number of mobile devices and also the consumer demand for mobile data communication. As a consequence, networking technologies are shifting from traditional highly centralized toward future organically distributed so as to meet such great demand. As the most general networking architecture, ad hoc network has long been regarded as the most challenging to design and quantify, due to the possible hybrid component settings and heterogeneous node behaviors there. Toward this end, we review the current state of the art of analytical models and techniques developed for performance analysis in ad hoc networks. Specifically, we discuss modeling techniques related to the fundamental topics in ad hoc network research: node mobility, wireless interference, node spatial distribution, and information delivery process. Besides discussions of advantages and limitations of available models, promising future research directions are also outlined.