Mobility-Aided Routing in Multi-Hop Heterogeneous Networks with Group Mobility

This paper investigates routing strategies for mobile and heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks. We leverage the knowledge about users mobility to improve the efficiency of route discovery and of the following data forwarding phase. In particular, we exploit group mobility behaviors, which allow us to apply a distributed on-line algorithm for the recognition of aggregated mobility patterns. Hence, we adopt a novel routing strategy that uses the aggregate structure formed within this algorithm to simplify the exchange of signaling and data messages. Finally, we demonstrate and quantify the benefits obtained with the proposed technique by means of a simulator for heterogeneous wireless networks.