Throughput bounds and energy consumption of mobile multihop networks

We investigate the throughput and energy consumption of regular and random line networks of moving vehicles. Based on a simple random MAC scheme, we show that regular line networks (equidistant nodes) outperform random line networks (uniformly randomly distributed nodes) in terms of throughput and, more drastically, in energy consumption and lifetime. For regular line networks, we give an optimum scheduler that takes full advantage of spatial reuse and show that the gain from the optimum scheduler is about 100% of the throughput at nearly the same energy consumption. For random line networks, we present and compare a throughput balancing strategy with power control and an energy balancing strategy without power control. It is shown that the strategy with power control can achieve better performance when the total transmit energy consumption and end-to-end reception probability are considered jointly.