  In this paper, we analyze asymptotic delay-throughput trade-offs in mobile
ad-hoc networks comprising heterogeneous nodes with restricted mobility. We
show that node spatial heterogeneity has the ability to drastically improve
upon existing scaling laws established under the assumption that nodes are
identical and uniformly visit the entire network area. In particular, we
consider the situation in which each node moves around its own home-point
according to a restricted mobility process which results into a spatial
stationary distribution that decays as a power law of exponent delta with the
distance from the home-point. For such restricted mobility model, we propose a
novel class of scheduling and routing schemes, which significantly outperforms
all delay-throughput results previously obtained in the case of identical
nodes. In particular, for delta = 2 it is possible to achieve almost constant
delay and almost constant per-node throughput (except for a poly-logarithmic
factor) as the number of nodes increases, even without resorting to
sophisticated coding or signal processing techniques.
