Impact of mobility structure on optimization of small-world networks of mobile agents

Abstract

In ad hoc wireless networking, units are connected to each other rather than to acentral, fixed, infrastructure. Constructing and maintaining such networks create severaltrade-off problems between robustness, communication speed, power consumption, etc., thatbridges engineering, computer science and the physics of complex systems. In this work, weaddress the role of mobility patterns of the agents on the optimal tuning of a small-worldtype network construction method. By this method, the network is updated periodically andheld static between the updates. We investigate the optimal updating times for differentscenarios of the movement of agents (modeling, for example, the fat-tailed trip distances,and periodicities, of human travel). We find that these mobility patterns affect the powerconsumption in non-trivial ways and discuss how these effects can best be handled.