Revisiting delay-capacity tradeoffs for mobile networks: The delay is overestimated

In the literature, one of the key assumptions in characterizing the scaling laws for wireless mobile networks, is to assume that nodes do not communicate while being mobile. In other words, contact opportunities are not considered during the mobility process itself. However, we find that this assumption leads to an inflated estimate of the delay, even in an order sense. To address this issue, a new framework that allows nodes to communicate while being mobile is proposed in this paper. Under this framework, it is shown that delays to obtain various levels of throughput for i.i.d. mobility model are overestimated and a new tighter delay-capacity tradeoff is suggested. Also, the framework is used to analytically derive the delay-capacity tradeoff of Lévy flight model for various levels of throughput, where Lévy flight is a random walk of a power-law flight distribution with an exponent α ∈ (0, 2]. It is known as a mobility model which closely captures human movement patterns. The tradeoffs from the proposed framework between the delay (D̅) and per-node throughput (λ) indicate that D̅ = O(√(max(1,nλ³))) holds for i.i.d. mobility and D̅ = O(√(min(n^1+αλ,n²))) holds for Lévy flight.