Mobile network management and robust spatial retreats via network dynamics

The mobility provided by mobile ad hoc and sensor networks will facilitate new mobility-oriented services. Recent work has demonstrated that, for many issues, mobility is advantageous to network operations. This paper proposes that the need for mobility may be captured by formulating the movement of nodes as a classical dynamical system. Motivated by classical mechanics, we propose the notion of network dynamics, where the position and movement of mobile devices evolve according to forces arising from system potential functions that capture the operational goals of the network. We argue that, in the context of moving communicating nodes, the equations of motion should be formulated as a steepest descent minimization of the system potential energy. Further, since global information is not practical in sensor networks, we introduce distributed algorithms that yield more practical implementations of network dynamics. The resulting algorithms are generic, and may be applied to produce balanced network configurations for different initial network deployments. As a second application of network dynamics, we examine the problem of adapting a mobile sensor network to the threat of a jammer. We show that the combination of spatial escape strategies with network dynamics prevents network partitioning that might arise from a mobile jammer.