Mobility Models for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Chapter 22

Mobility Modeling and Opportunistic Network Performance Analysis

In the previous chapter, we discussed the effects of mobility modeling on the accuracy of wireless network simulation results. In this chapter, we will consider the effects of mobility modeling on another important performance evaluation methodology for next generation wireless networks, namely, theoretical analysis.

More specifically, we will focus our attention on recent results aimed at characterizing asymptotic opportunistic network performance, that is, performance trends observed when the number n of nodes in the network grows to infinity. The aim of this chapter is to show how different assumptions about the probability distribution of the inter-contact time, which is a by-product of the underlying mobility model, lead to radically different conclusions about performance trends for large networks. This observation applies to different communication schemes—unicast and broadcast—as well as to different forwarding strategies used to route a message from source to destination.

We will start this chapter by discussing the case of unicast communication, in which a single message M has to be delivered from a source node S to a destination node D, and then consider the case of broadcast communication, in which a message M originating at a source node S has to be delivered to all other nodes in the network.

22.1 Unicast in Opportunistic Networks

Unicast is one of the most important and widely used communication ...