Surrendering Autonomy: Can Cooperative Mobility Help?

In this paper, we develop a Cooperative Mobility Model that captures new salient features of collaborative and mission-oriented MANETs. In particular, the cost-benefit framework of our model is a significant advance in modelling heterogenous networks whose nodes exhibit the complete range of autonomy with respect to mobility. We then describe the design of CoopSim, a platform for conducting simulation experiments to evaluate the impact of parameter, policy and algorithm choices on any system based on the proposed Cooperative Mobility Model. We present a small but illustrative case study and use the experimental evidence derived from it to give an initial evaluation of the merits of the proposed model and the efficacy of the CoopSim software. In our case study, we propose studying the impact of the proposed model on improving the end-to-end communication based on the QoS parameter, namely BER.