Content-centric wireless networks with limited buffers: when mobility hurts

We analyze throughput–delay scaling laws of mobile ad hoc networks under a content-centric traffic scenario, where users are mainly interested in retrieving contents cached by other nodes. We assume limited buffer size available at each node and Zipf-like content popularity. We consider nodes uniformly visiting the network area according to a random-walk mobility model, whose flight size varies from the typical distance among the nodes (quasi-static case) up to the edge length of the network area (reshuffling mobility model). Our main findings are: 1) the best throughput–delay tradeoffs are achieved in the quasi-static case: increasing the mobility degree of nodes leads to worse and worse performance; ii) the best throughput–delay tradeoffs can be recovered by power control (i.e., by adapting the transmission range to the content) even in the complete reshuffling case.