On the Capacity Region of MANET: Scheduling and Routing Strategy

We characterize the capacity region of a mobile ad hoc network (in which nodes employ the store-carry-forward communication scheme) and move according to an arbitrary ergodic mobility process. We identify the class of scheduling policies achieving maximum throughput and introduce a joint scheduling and routing formulation that maps the problem into a multicommodity flow over an associated
contact

graph
. Previous capacity results have been derived under the strong assumption that nodes are identical and uniformly visit the entire network area, resulting in a fully connected homogeneous contact graph in which a simple two-hop routing scheme is optimal. Our approach allows extending the analysis to heterogeneous nodes with anisotropic mobility patterns, as typically encountered in realistic mobility traces. In particular, we apply our framework to an experimental network based on vehicular mobility and show that, in scenarios with inhomogeneous contact times, the two-hop routing strategy can significantly be inefficient in terms of throughput and delay.