Fast Flooding over Manhattan

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the flooding time in a Manhattan-mobility-based MANET, providing the first asymptotic upper bound that reveals efficient broadcast capabilities even in sparse, disconnected regions.

Contribution

It introduces the first asymptotic upper bound on flooding time in a Manhattan mobility MANET, accounting for non-uniform spatial distribution and low connectivity scenarios.

Findings

Flooding time decreases with larger R and V.

Flooding can be fast even in sparse, disconnected areas.

The bound is tight for a wide range of parameters.

Abstract

We consider a Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) formed by n agents that move at speed V according to the Manhattan Random-Way Point model over a square region of side length L. The resulting stationary (agent) spatial probability distribution is far to be uniform: the average density over the "central zone" is asymptotically higher than that over the "suburb". Agents exchange data iff they are at distance at most R within each other. We study the flooding time of this MANET: the number of time steps required to broadcast a message from one source agent to all agents of the network in the stationary phase. We prove the first asymptotical upper bound on the flooding time. This bound holds with high probability, it is a decreasing function of R and V, and it is tight for a wide and relevant range of the network parameters (i.e. L, R and V). A consequence of our result is that flooding over the sparse and highly-disconnected suburb can be as fast as flooding over the dense and connected central zone. Rather surprisingly, this property holds even when R is exponentially below the connectivity threshold of the MANET and the speed V is very low.