Node mobility and capacity in wireless controllable ad hoc networks

The performance of wireless stationary and mobile networks is known to be limited by the throughput-delay trade-off. In this paper, we exploit controlled mobility to overcome the performance limit of random networks. Although many literature on controlled mobility have studied about the optimal relay relocation algorithm to improve the throughput of individual source-destination pair, the improved throughput is limited by the capacity scale of an arbitrary network Theta(1/root n). By adopting more autonomous controlled mobility, we propose a mobility control strategy achieving the constant per-node capacity scale with bounded delay. For the purpose of this, we identify the key control factors for controlled mobility by analyzing a random network. To estimate the cost-effectiveness of the proposed mobility control strategy, we provide the delay scales and the energy consumption model. Finally, we propose a heuristic mobility control algorithm to verify the applicability of our theoretic results to a practical system. Through extensive simulations, we show the proposed mobility control algorithm considerably improves the network performance. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.