Path Planning for Network Performance

Path planning and network design are often treated by architects of mobile communication networks as separate problems. In fact, most mobile ad hoc network (MANET) designs do not consider the path that the network nodes would take as part of the objective set, but incorporate them in an abstract form as general constraints on mobility (limit on the initial configuration and the node velocity). It appears that significant performance improvement may be possible if multiobjective optimization is attempted on performance indices such as connectivity of the network and arrival time of all nodes at a specified terminal set. In this study we provide an efficient decentralized method for computing the Pareto optimal set of plans, and show the benefit of path planning under six different metrics of MANET performance.