Characterizing link connectivity for opportunistic mobile networking: Does mobility suffice?

Abstract

With recent drastic growth in the number of users carrying smart mobile devices, it is not hard to envision opportunistic ad-hoc communications taking place with such devices carried by humans. This leads to, however, a new challenge to the conventional link-level metrics, solely defined based on user mobility, such as inter-contact time, since there are many constraints including limited battery power that prevent the wireless interface of each user from being always `on' for communication. By taking into account the process of each user's availability jointly with mobility-induced contact/inter-contact process, we investigate how each of them affects the link-level connectivity depending on their relative operating time scales. We then identify three distinct regimes in each of which (1) the so-called impact of mobility on network performance prevails; (2) such impact of mobility disappears or its extent is not that significant; (3) the user availability process becomes dominant. Our findings not only caution that mobility alone is not sufficient to characterize the link-level dynamics, which in turn can lead to highly misleading results, but also suggest the presence of many uncharted research territories for further exploration.