Mobility in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: A Villain or a Friend?

Ad hoc wireless networks are multi-hop networks in which mobile nodes cooperate to maintain network connectivity and perform various functions including routing. This talk focuses on two different views of mobility in ad hoc wireless networks. One view casts mobility as an undesirable feature. This view normally represents an ad hoc wireless network as a traditional graph model. Various mobility-deterred mechanisms have been proposed to counter the effect of node mobility, including proactive maintenance of link state information to ensure connectivity. Another view considers mobility as a desirable feature which can increase network capacity and even assist the routing process. Those so called mobility-assisted models include Epidemic routing, Infostations, and message ferrying. The author offers some of his own view on these two approaches and discusses some recent results on mobility-deterred mechanisms, including buffer zone and view consistency. Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW’05) 1545-0678/05 $20.00 © 2005 IEEE