On the Fundamental Limits of Broadcasting in Wireless Mobile Networks

In this talk, we investigate the fundamental properties of broadcasting in mobile wireless networks. In particular, we characterize broadcast capacity and latency of a mobile network, subject to the condition that the stationary node spatial distribution generated by the mobility model is uniform. We first study the intrinsic properties of broadcasting, and present a broadcasting scheme, called RippleCast, that simultaneously achieves asymptotically optimal broadcast capacity and latency, subject to a weak upper bound on the maximum node velocity. This study intendedly ignores the burden related to the selection of broadcast relay nodes within the mobile network, and shows that optimal broadcasting in mobile networks is, in principle, possible. We then investigate the broadcasting problem when the relay selection burden is taken into account, and present a combined distributed leader election and broadcasting scheme achieving a broadcast capacity and latency which is within a $Theta((log n)^{1+frac{2}{alpha}})$ factor from optimal, where $n$ is the number of mobile nodes and $alpha>2$ is the path loss exponent. However, this result holds only under the assumption that the upper bound on node velocity converges to zero (although with a very slow, poly-logarithmic rate) as $n$ grows to infinity. To the best of our knowledge, our is the first paper investigating the effects of node mobility on the fundamental properties of broadcasting, and showing that, while optimal broadcasting in a mobile network is in principle possible, the coordination efforts related to the selection of broadcast relay nodes lead to sub-optimal broadcasting performance.