Restricted Mobility Improves Delay-Throughput Trade-offs in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that restricted node mobility based on spatial heterogeneity can drastically improve delay and throughput performance in mobile ad-hoc networks, achieving near-constant delay and throughput.

Contribution

It introduces a novel restricted mobility model and scheduling schemes that outperform existing results, especially for specific mobility decay exponents.

Findings

Almost constant delay and throughput for delta=2

Significant improvement over uniform mobility models

Effective routing schemes without advanced coding techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze asymptotic delay-throughput trade-offs in mobile ad-hoc networks comprising heterogeneous nodes with restricted mobility. We show that node spatial heterogeneity has the ability to drastically improve upon existing scaling laws established under the assumption that nodes are identical and uniformly visit the entire network area. In particular, we consider the situation in which each node moves around its own home-point according to a restricted mobility process which results into a spatial stationary distribution that decays as a power law of exponent delta with the distance from the home-point. For such restricted mobility model, we propose a novel class of scheduling and routing schemes, which significantly outperforms all delay-throughput results previously obtained in the case of identical nodes. In particular, for delta = 2 it is possible to achieve almost constant delay and almost constant per-node throughput (except for a poly-logarithmic factor) as the number of nodes increases, even without resorting to sophisticated coding or signal processing techniques.