On the Latency for Information Dissemination in Mobile Wireless Networks

In wireless networks, node mobility may be exploited to assist in information dissemination over time. We analyze the latency for information dissemination in large-scale mobile wireless networks. To study this problem, we map a network of mobile nodes to a network of stationary nodes with dynamic links. We then use results from percolation theory to show that under a constrained i.i.d. mobility model, the scaling behavior of the latency falls into two regimes. When the network is not percolated (subcritical), the latency scales linearly with the initial Euclidean distance between the sender and the receiver; when the network is percolated (supercritical), the latency scales sub-linearly with the distance.