Impact of mobility structure on the optimization of small-world networks of mobile agents

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different mobility patterns of agents influence the optimal configuration and power efficiency of small-world networks in ad hoc wireless systems, revealing complex dependencies.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of mobility pattern effects on small-world network optimization, considering various agent movement models and their impact on network power consumption.

Findings

Mobility patterns significantly affect network power consumption.

Optimal update timing varies with different agent movement models.

Mobility-aware tuning improves network efficiency.

Abstract

In ad hoc wireless networking, units are connected to each other rather than to a central, fixed, infrastructure. Constructing and maintaining such networks create several trade-off problems between robustness, communication speed, power consumption, etc., that bridges engineering, computer science and the physics of complex systems. In this work, we address the role of mobility patterns of the agents on the optimal tuning of a small-world type network construction method. By this method, the network is updated periodically and held static between the updates. We investigate the optimal updating times for different scenarios of the movement of agents (modeling, for example, the fat-tailed trip distances, and periodicities, of human travel). We find that these mobility patterns affect the power consumption in non-trivial ways and discuss how these effects can best be handled.