We study the throughput-delay performance tradeoff in large-scale wireless ad
hoc networks. It has been shown that the per source-destination pair throughput
can be improved from Theta(1/sqrt(n log n)) to Theta(1) if nodes are allowed to
move and a 2-hop relay scheme is employed. The price paid for such an
improvement on throughput is large delay. Indeed, the delay scaling of the
2-hop relay scheme is Theta(n log n) under the random walk mobility model. In
this paper, we employ coding techniques to improve the throughput-delay
trade-off for mobile wireless networks. For the random walk mobility model, we
improve the delay from Theta(n log n) to Theta(n) by employing Reed-Solomon
codes. Our approach maintains the diversity gained by mobility while decreasing
the delay.