Mobility diversity in mobile wireless networks

In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of mobility diversity as the diversity gained by transmitting the information of the nodes of a mobile network over different network topologies. Due to the mobility of the nodes, different network topologies emerge which can benefit the information transmission throughout the network. In traditional diversity schemes, such as frequency, time, or spatial diversity, a signal is transmitted over different diversity dimensions (e.g., different frequency bands, different time intervals, or different spatial paths) to combat the destructive effects of fading in each individual channel. In a mobile wireless network, the nodes can exploit the topology diversity to communicated with their corresponding destinations more reliably as compared to the case when the topology of the network is fixed. In fact, in a fixed topology, the probability of a source having a poor connectivity to its destination is higher than the case when there are multiple topologies over which the communication can occur.