On the Throughput-Delay Tradeoff in Georouting Networks

We study the scaling properties of a georouting scheme in a wireless multi-hop network of $n$ mobile nodes. Our aim is to increase the network capacity quasi-linearly with $n$ , while keeping the average delay bounded. In our model, we consider mobile nodes moving according to an independent identically distributed random walk with velocity $v$ and transmitting packets to randomly chosen fixed and known destinations. The average packet delivery delay of our scheme is of order $1/v$ , and it achieves network capacity of order $({n}/{log nlog log n})$ . This shows a practical throughput-delay tradeoff, in particular when compared with the seminal result of Gupta and Kumar, which shows network capacity of order ${(n/log n)}^{1/2}$ and negligible delay and the groundbreaking result of Grossglauser and Tse, which achieves network capacity of order $n$ but with an average delay of order $sqrt {n}/v$ . The foundation of our improved capacity and delay tradeoff relies on the fact that we use a mobility model that contains straight-line segments, a model that we consider more realistic than classic Brownian motions. We confirm the generality of our analytical results using simulations under various interference models.