Relays, base stations, and meshes: enhancing mobile networks with infrastructure

Networks composed of mobile nodes inherently suffer from intermittent connections and high delays. Performance can be improved by adding supporting infrastructure, including base stations, meshes, and relays, but the cost-performance trade-offs of different designs is poorly understood. To examine these trade-offs, we have deployed a large-scale vehicular network and three infrastructure enhancement alternatives. The results of these deployments demonstrate some of the advantages of each kind of infrastructure; however, these conclusions can be applied only to other networks of similar characteristics, including size, wireless technologies, and mobility patterns. Thus we complement our deployment with a demonstrably accurate analytical model of large-scale networks in the presence of infrastructure. Based on our deployment and analysis, we make several fundamental observations about infrastructure-enhanced mobile networks. First, if the average packet delivery delay in a vehicular deployment can be reduced by a factor of two by adding x base stations, the same reduction requires 2x mesh nodes or 5x relays. Given the high cost of deploying base stations, relays or mesh nodes can be a more cost-effective enhancement. Second, we observe that adding small amount of infrastructure is vastly superior to even a large number of mobile nodes capable of routing to one another, obviating the need for mobile-to-mobile disruption tolerant routing schemes.