Mobile Conductance in Sparse Networks and Mobility- Connectivity Tradeoff
Abstract: An important application for modern large-scale networks is to spread the information efficiently to the largest audience. To better understand the theoretical underpinnings, a novel graph metric namedmobile conductance was proposed in our previous work to evaluate the information spreading time of a connected mobile network. By capturing the details of both network structure and mobility pattern, this metric essentially determines the network bottleneck for conducting information flow under general network mobility. Despite major relaxation on node mobility, only slight relaxation on network connectivity was made in our previous work. In this paper, we make another major relaxation on the network connectivity by extending the mobile-conductance based analytical model to the sparse setting, hence offering a unified view. Interestingly, a penalty factor is identified for information spreading in sparse networks as compared to the connected scenario, which is then intuitively interpreted and verified by simulations. By jointly considering mobility and connectivity, we derive the mobileconductance for various mobility models with general connectivity. Using these analytical results, the mobility-connectivity tradeoff is quantitatively analyzed to determine how much mobility may be exploited to compensate for network connectivity deficiency.