Delay and Capacity Trade-Offs in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Global Perspective

Since the original work of Grossglauser and Tse, which showed that mobility can increase the capacity of an ad hoc network, there has been a lot of interest in characterizing the delay-capacity relationship in ad hoc networks. Various mobility models have been studied in the literature, and the delay-capacity relationships under those models have been characterized. The results indicate that there are trade-offs between the delay and capacity, and that the nature of these trade-offs is strongly influenced by the choice of the mobility model. Some questions that arise are: (i) How representative are these mobility models studied in the literature? (ii) Can the delay-capacity relationship be significantly different under some other "reasonable" mobility model? (iii) What sort of delay-capacity trade-off are we likely to see in a real world scenario? In this paper, we take the first step toward answering some of these questions. In particular, we analyze, among others, the mobility models studied in recent related works, under a unified framework. We relate the nature of delay-capacity trade-off to the nature of node motion, thereby providing a better understanding of the delay-capacity relationship in ad hoc networks in comparison to earlier works.