MANETS: High mobility can make up for low transmission power

Abstract: We consider a Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANET) formed by "n" nodes that move independently at random over a finite square region of the plane. Nodes exchange data if they are at distance at most "r" within each other, where r>0 is the node transmission radius. The "flooding time" is the number of time steps required to broadcast a message from a source node to every node of the network. Flooding time is an important measure of the speed of information spreading in dynamic networks. We derive a nearly-tight upper bound on the flooding time which is a decreasing function of the maximal "velocity" of the nodes. It turns out that, when the node velocity is sufficiently high, even if the node transmission radius "r" is far below the "connectivity threshold", the flooding time does not asymptotically depend on "r". This implies that flooding can be very fast even though every "snapshot" (i.e. the static random geometric graph at any fixed time) of the MANET is fully disconnected. Data reach all nodes quickly despite these ones use very low transmission power. Our result is the first analytical evidence of the fact that high, random node mobility strongly speed-up information spreading and, at the same time, let nodes save energy.