Mobility is central to various applications, from the classical problems of searching for a moving target and rescue mission in military and disaster settings, to deploying mobile ad-hoc/sensor networks for surveillance and data communication over hostile terrain and underwater. While the random mobility pattern of nodes in these networks has been considered as the main source of uncertainty and disruption of communication links, it can also facilitate reliable and predictable performance, if properly controlled and actively exploited. Most existing approaches have taken advantage of nodes' mobility only as passive vehicles for data forwarding upon contact by chance, with an over-simplifying assumption that every pair of nodes is making contacts with each other according to a Poisson process, which is recently contradicted by empirically observed non-Poisson nature with high degree of heterogeneity in various mobile networks.
The long-term goal of this research is to develop a unified methodology for efficient protocol design and control of nodes in heterogeneous mobile ad-hoc networks and delay/disruption-tolerant networks under non-Poisson contacts. The goal further extends to the use of mobile nodes with controllable mobility that can autonomously exploit the changing diversity. The broader impact of this research lies in its interdisciplinary nature in addressing the analysis and design of algorithms running on mobility with heterogeneous non-Poisson contacts, which is also central to other scientific areas such as epidemiology, foraging ecology and biology, all driven by contacts among living organisms. This tight relationship between mobile ad-hoc networks and various phenomena in nature will serve as a vivid example for undergraduate students at a freshmen level or even to general public.
