Coding improves the throughput-delay trade-off in mobile wireless networks

We study the throughput-delay performance trade-off in large-scale wireless ad hoc networks. It has been shown that the per source-destination pair throughput can be improved from Θ(1/√n log n) to Θ(1) if nodes are allowed to move and a 2-hop relay scheme is employed. The price paid for such an improvement on throughput is large delay. Indeed, the delay scaling of the 2-hop relay scheme is Θ(n log n) under the random walk mobility model. In this paper, we employ coding techniques to improve the throughput-delay trade-off for mobile wireless networks. For the random walk mobility model, we improve the delay from Θ(n log n) to Θ(n) by employing Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. Our approach maintains the diversity gained by mobility while decreasing the delay.