Mobility Management in MANETs: Exploit the Positive Impacts of Mobility

Abstract

The question of whether mobility is a blessing (Burleigh et al., IEEECommunications Magazine, 41:128-136, 2003; Capkun et al., Proc. of ACMMobiHoc, 2003) or a curse (Zhang et al., Proc. of ACM MobiHoc, 2005) toad hoc networks has attracted a significant amount of research interest.Some researchers argue that mobility is a hurdle, as it makes therouting, naming and addressing, and location services more challenging.Some new mechanisms such as Zhang et al. (Proc. of ACM MobiHoe, 2005)have been proposed to tackle the problems caused by node mobility inMANETs. Others argue that far?from being a hurdle, mobility can beexploited to increase the system performance. Carefully designedprotocols may exploit the mobility to obtain advantages in manyimportant aspects of ad hoc networks, such as network capacity,security, and information dissemination.This chapter surveys the impact of mobility in ad hoc networks from awide perspective. We refrain from going into minute details of mobility,and instead?head for giving a broader picture. The goal of this chapteris to endorse new approaches to employ mobility in ad hoc networks basedon the current situation and show why mobility can help in manydifferent aspects (Cooper et?al., Proc. of IEEE MASCOTS, 2005; Camp etal., Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2(5):483-502, 2002).