A Novel Method for Studying 3D-MANET Capacity Based on Zipf’s Law

Emerging three-dimensional (3D) mobile ad hoc networks paradigms such as flying ad hoc network and 3Dvehicular ad hoc network have contributed significantly to various fields. Accurately characterizing the throughput capacity of 3D-MANET is becoming increasingly critical. For the convenience of model solving, the prior work has typically been analyzed based on the uniform or specific probability distribution of network nodes, but ignoring such the node distribution is difficult to describe the real application scene. With was formerly different, in this paper, we propose a cell-gridded 3D network model in which movement and distribution of nodes follow Zipf’s law with exponent $\varphi$ (many scholars have proved this law to conform to the movement law of the actual world). Moreover, our model can cover a variety of distribution scenarios with changes in $\varphi$ value. We derived the packet delivery rate and network throughput capacity scaling law under the two-hop relay routing algorithm with the help of Zipf’s law and classical capacity analysis theories and discussed the impact of $\varphi$ on capacity. Additionally, our research findings indicate that if we can fully utilize network users’ movement and distribution status information in different areas and reasonably divide network cells, it will be expected to improve network throughput capacity performance.