Network Capacity Region and Minimum Energy Function for a Delay-Tolerant Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Abstract: We investigate two quantities of interest in a delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc network: the network capacity region and the minimum energy function. The network capacity region is defined as the set of all input rates that the network can stably support considering all possible scheduling and routing algorithms. Given any input rate vector in this region, the minimum energy function establishes the minimum time average power required to support it. In this work, we consider a cell-partitioned model of a delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc network with general Markovian mobility. This simple model incorporates the essential features of locality of wireless transmissions as well as node mobility and enables us to exactly compute the corresponding network capacity and minimum energy function. Further, we propose simple schemes that offer performance guarantees that are arbitrarily close to these bounds at the cost of an increased delay.