Capacity Region, Minimum Energy and Delay for a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network

We investigate two quantities of fundamental interest in a mobile ad-hoc network: the capacity region and the minimum energy function of the network. The capacity region is defined as the closure of the set of all input rates that the network can stably support. The minimum energy function establishes a lower bound on the amount of energy required to support a given set of input rates. We consider a specific model of the mobile ad-hoc network that enables us to exactly compute these quantities. Further, we propose schemes that offer performance guarantees that are arbitrarily close to these bounds at the cost of an increased delay. The exact nature of the associated delay tradeoff when performance is pushed towards the minimum energy bound is another fundamental characteristic of the network that is discussed in this work.