Improving the performance of challenged networks with controlled mobility

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the application of an adapted controlled mobility strategy on self-propelling nodes, which could efficiently provide network resource to users scattered on a designated area. We design a virtual force-based controlled mobility scheme, named VFPc, and evaluate its ability to be jointly used with a dual packetforwarding and epidemic routing protocol. In particular, we study the possibility for end-users to achieve synchronous communications at given times of the considered scenarios. On this basis, we study the delay distribution for such user traffic and show the advantages of VFPc compared to other packet-forwarding and packet-replication schemes, and highlight that VFPc-enabled applications could take benefit of both schemes to yield a better user experience, despite challenging network conditions.