Mobility-Based Topology Control for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The mobility control of mobile nodes can be an alternative to the transmitting power adjustment in case that fixed transmitting power is just used in the topology control. Assuming the controllable mobility of nodes, we propose four distributed mobility control algorithms assuring the network connectivity and the capacity improvement. We compare the throughput of each algorithm with the widely accepted capacity scale law considering the energy consumption. The proposed mobility-based topology control algorithms are named according to its operational characteristics: RP (Rendezvous Point), NNT (Nearest Neighbor Tracking), DM (Diffusion Model), and GP (Grid Packing). Through extensive simulations, we show that all the proposed algorithms successfully change a partitioned random network topology into a connected network topology without the power control. Furthermore, the topology reconfigured by the mobility control has the improved network capacity beyond that of the initial network. In the newly defined performance metric, effective capacity, the simulation results show that GP provides more improved and stable performance over various node densities with the short completion time.