Improving Network Connectivity in the Presence of Heavy-Tailed Interference

The heavy tailed (HT) traffic from wireless users, caused by the emerging Internet and multimedia applications, introduces a HT interference region within which network users will experience unbounded delay with infinite mean and/or variance. Specifically, it is proven that, if the network traffic of primary networks (e. g., cellular and Wi-Fi networks) is heavy tail distributed, there always exists a critical density lambda(p) such that, if the density of primary users is larger than lambda(p), the secondary network users (e. g., sensor devices and cognitive radio users) can experience unbounded end-to-end delay with infinite variance even though there exists feasible routing paths along the network users. To counter this problem, the mobility of network users is utilized to achieve delay-bounded connectivity, which simultaneously ensures the existence of routing paths and the finiteness of the delay variance along these paths. In particular, it is shown that there exists a critical threshold on the maximum radius that the secondary user can reach, above which delay-bounded connectivity is achievable in the secondary networks. In this case, the end-to-end latency of secondary users is shown to be asymptotically linear in the Euclidean distance between the transmitter and receiver.