Restricted mobility improves delay-throughput tradeoffs in mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we analyze asymptotic delay-throughput tradeoffs 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 δ 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 δ = 2 it is possible to achieve almost constant delay and almost constant per-node throughput (except for a polylogarithmic factor) as the number of nodes increases, even without resorting to sophisticated coding or signal processing techniques.