Improving Network Connectivity in the Presence of Heavy-Tailed Interference

The heavy tailed (HT) traffic from wireless users, caused by the emerging Internet and multimedia applications, introduces a HT interference region within which network users will experience unbounded delay with infinite mean and/or variance. Specifically, it is proven that, if the network traffic of primary networks (e.g., cellular and Wi-Fi networks) is heavy tail distributed, there always exists a critical density λ_p such that, if the density of primary users is larger than λ_p, the secondary network users (e.g., sensor devices and cognitive radio users) can experience unbounded end-to-end delay with infinite variance even though there exists feasible routing paths along the network users. To counter this problem, the mobility of network users is utilized to achieve delay-bounded connectivity, which simultaneously ensures the existence of routing paths and the finiteness of the delay variance along these paths. In particular, it is shown that there exists a critical threshold on the maximum radius that the secondary user can reach, above which delay-bounded connectivity is achievable in the secondary networks. In this case, the end-to-end latency of secondary users is shown to be asymptotically linear in the Euclidean distance between the transmitter and receiver.