8
Mobility Effects in Wireless Mobile Networks
Contents
8.1 Introduction
In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and wireless mesh networks have sparked much research interest. These wireless networks offer promising technologies and are anticipated to make a great difference in everyday life in the near future.
Mobile ad hoc networks are comprised of mobile nodes communicating via wireless links. Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of small sensor nodes distributed over a vast field to obtain fine-grained sensing data. Mobility is an important factor that affects performance of wireless networks [1, 2], including wireless sensor networks [3, 4], mobile ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. In fact, topology of a mobile wireless network is subject to continuous changes, which considerably affects the performance of routing protocols [5]. Mobility might be controlled by network management [6, 7] and hence is useful for achieving sensing coverage, data gathering, or balancing energy consumption.
In a typical delay-tolerant network (DTN), mobility of nodes is used to deliver data. ...
