1268 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 14, NO. 3, MARCH 2015
left edge is attached the right one such that the border effects
can be avoided in the performance analysis. Furthermore, we
assume that all n nodes are evenly divided into m =Θ(n
α
)
groups, α ∈ [0, 1], and time is divided into slots of equal
duration for packetized transmission. Note that for a source-
destination pair, say S and D, the probability that S and D
are located in the same group is Θ(n
−α
), a small value which
approaches 0 very quickly as n scales up for 0 <α≤ 1.In
other words, for 0 <α≤ 1, S and D are located in different
groups with a probability of asymptotically approaching 1.
Therefore, neglecting the case of S and D locating in the same
group will not affect the scaling laws of throughput, delay, and
their tradeoffs, and hereafter we consider only the case that S
and D are located in different groups. Note also that the results
obtained in Sections IV and V still hold for the special case of
α =0, i.e., all nodes are divided into one group.
To characterize the correlation among nodes, we assume that
in any time slot all nodes of one group are constrained to stay
within the same portion of network area, i.e., a group region,
which is defined as a disk area with radius R. To exclusively
explore and clearly illustrate the i mpact of correlated mobility
on throughput and delay performance, we maintain an average
node density n in each group region. As each group contains
Θ(n/n
α
)=Θ(n
1−α
) nodes, we can easily see that the radius
of each group region is determined as R =Θ(
√
n
1−α
· n
−1
)=
Θ(n
−α/2
).
B. Correlated Mobility Model
For a node i,weuseG(i) to denote the group that i belongs
to, i.e., i ∈G(i). In a time slot t, the position of node i is
given by (X
i
(t),X
i
(t)), where X
i
(t) denotes the central point
position of the group region associated with G(i) and X
i
(t)
denotes the relative position of node i within its group region.
For any two nodes j = i, we always have X
i
(t)=X
j
(t) as
long as G(i)=G(j). Without incurring any ambiguity, in the
following we refer to “the central point of a group region” as
“the central point of a group”, or simply “group center”.
The Reference Point Group Mobility (RPGM) model, which
was first introduced in [22], is adopted here to model the cor-
related mobility. Specifically, for a node i ∈G(i), its mobility
process {(X
i
(t),X
i
(t)); t =0, 1,...} is defined as follows.
We first introduce the movement of group center for G(i),
i.e., {X
i
(t); t =0, 1,...}. As shown in Fig. 1, a group center
moves according to a random direction mobility model [23],
[24] with a speed of no more than υ ∈ [0, 1]. Therefore, for any
time s lot t, we always have |X
i
(t) − X
i
(t +1)|≤υ, where |·|
denotes the Euclidean distance. With such a model, initially
all group centers are uniformly distributed and for each time
slot each group center then moves across the network with a
speed and a direction uniformly selected from [0,υ] and [0, 2π),
respectively. There exists no correlation among the movements
of different group centers, and thus the moving speed (and also
the moving direction) of each group center is i.i.d. For a group
center, its movement among different time slots is also i.i.d.
Now we proceed to define the relative movement of node
i within its group region, i.e., {X
i
(t); t =0, 1,...}.During
a time slot t, once the position X
i
(t) of group center is
determined, all nodes belonging to G(i) will concurrently move
into the disk area centered at X
i
(t) due to the correlated node
mobility. Note that according to the network model, under most
settings (except for the case α =0), all nodes belonging to
G(i) have to reside in a disk area of Θ(n
−α
) during each time
slot. Thus, we assume that each node moves within its group
region according to the i.i.d. mobility model [15], [25], [26],
which indicates that given the group center X
i
(t), node i may
uniformly appear at any place in its group region centered at
X
i
(t).
Remark 1: Note that the mobility of group regions will
unavoidably lead to their overlapping. Therefore, it is possible
to reform the group members within the overlapping area, so
as to achieve better performances of throughput, delay, or the
tradeoff. For example, consider a source-destination pair, say
S and D, which initially belong to two different groups, say
source group and destination group, respectively. When the
source group and the destination group meet together and S
(resp. D) is just located within in the overlapping area, S
(resp. D) may enter the destination group (resp. source group)
by changing its membership. By utilizing the member reform-
ing in group overlapping area, it changes the S-D traffic flow
from inter-group to intra-group, which enables a much better
throughput, delay, and their tradeoff to be achieved for the S-D
traffic.
However, as the group overlapping behavior involves a lot
of factors, such as the moving speed and moving direction of
group center, the node mobility within group region, the num-
ber of overlapping groups, the shape and area of overlapping
area, etc., it is very difficult (if not impossible) to quantita-
tively analyze the probability of member reforming i n group
overlapping area. Note that the main focus of this paper is to
explore the throughput-delay tradeoff under correlated mobility
with a general setting of moving speed, and to explicitly show
the impact of node transmission range on throughput, delay
and their tradeoffs. As a very initial step and also to keep the
analysis tractable, we assume in this paper a simple scenario
where the case of group region overlapping was not considered,
similar to that in available works [20], [21].
Remark 2: Actually, it is very challenging to accurately
characterize the heterogeneous random node mobility patterns
in MANETs. In particular, the node movements may be identi-
cally distributed and independent of each other or be correlated
to each other; may be able to visit the whole network region or
just a very limited area; may have different moving speeds; may
be partially predictable (e.g., on-road vehicles) or totally unpre-
dictable (e.g., animals); etc. So far, a lot of analytical models
have been proposed to characterize the MANETs mobility,
such as the i.i.d. model, random walk model, random waypoint
model, Brownian model, the Levy walk model, home-point
mobility, reference point group mobility, nomadic community,
etc. (see [27] for a survey). Note that all the available mobility
models can only be able to represent partial typical features
of real node mobility in MANETs. It still remains an open
problem to devise a general mobility model which is able to
match the heterogeneous node mobility in MANETs.
Different from previous works focusing on independent
node movements, we considered in this paper MANETs with