Even One-Dimensional Mobility Increases the Capacity of Wireless Networks

Abstract

We study the capacity of ad hoc wireless networks with mobile nodes. The mobility model examined is one where the nodes are restricted to move along one-dimensional paths. We examine the scaling laws for the per user throughput achievable over long time-scales, making this suitable for applications with loose delay constraints. We show that under this regime of restricted mobility, we attain a constant throughput (i.e., Θ (1)) per user, which is significantly higher than the throughput of fixed networks, which decays as O(1/√n) with the number of nodes n, as shown by Gupta and Kumar.