Distance Reduction in Mobile Wireless Communication: Lower Bound Analysis and Practical Attainment

The transmission energy required for a wireless communication increases superlinearly with the communication distance. In a mobile wireless network, nodal movement can be exploited to greatly reduce the energy required by postponing communication until the sender moves close to a target receiver, subject to application deadline constraints. In this paper, the authors characterize the fundamental performance limit, namely the lower bound expected communication distance, achievable by any postponement algorithm within given deadline constraints. They consider a realistic map based stochastic movement model, of which the well known random waypoint model is a special case. For the random waypoint model, they develop a tight analytical lower bound of the achievable expected communication distance.