Smooth trade-offs between throughput and delay in mobile ad hoc networks

Throughput capacity in mobile ad hoc networks has been studied extensively under many different mobility models. However, most previous research assumes global mobility, and the results show that a constant per-node throughput can be achieved at the cost of very high delay. Thus, we are having a very big gap here, i.e., either low throughput and low delay in static networks or high throughput and high delay in mobile networks. In this paper, employing a practical restricted random mobility model, we try to fill this gap. Specifically, we assume that a network of unit area with n nodes is evenly divided into cells with an area of n ^-2α, each of which is further evenly divided into squares with an area of n ^-2β (0 ≤ α ≤ β ≤ {1\2). All nodes can only move inside the cell which they are initially distributed in, and at the beginning of each time slot, every node moves from its current square to a uniformly chosen point in a uniformly chosen adjacent square. By proposing a new multihop relay scheme, we present smooth trade-offs between throughput and delay by controlling nodes' mobility. We also consider a network of area n ^γ (0≤ γ ≤ 1) and find that network size does not affect the results obtained before. © 2006 IEEE.