Throughput scaling in wireless networks with restricted mobility

We study throughput scaling in an ad-hoc wireless network where the communication domain is divided into over-lapping neighborhoods and n mobile nodes are restricted to move within their assigned neighborhood. In our model, when a node is located in a region not shared with any other neighborhood, it transmits to nodes of its own neighborhood only; when it is in an area that overlaps with another neighborhood, it transmits to nodes of the overlapping neighborhood. Communication between source-destination pairs is subject to interference from other nodes. By adopting a deterministic approach, we obtain an achievable throughput which is a function of properties of the node locations and neighborhood dimensions. As special cases of our neighborhood model, the results of Gupta-Kumar [1] and Grossglauser-Tse [2] can be recovered. We then study the case of random placement of nodes with n^α neighborhoods, where 0 ≤ α < 1, and achieve a throughput of Ω(n^1-α/2). Hence our model captures every order of growth for the throughput, encompassing the results from both [1] and [2] as extreme situations.