7th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks

Research Article

Analysis of Relay Protocols for Throwbox--Equipped DTNs

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/WIOPT.2009.5291625,
        author={Mouhamad Ibrahim and Philippe Nain and Iacopo Carreras},
        title={Analysis of Relay Protocols for Throwbox--Equipped DTNs},
        proceedings={7th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={WIOPT},
        year={2009},
        month={10},
        keywords={Opportunistic networks design  throwboxes DTNs Markov modelling performance evaluation},
        doi={10.1109/WIOPT.2009.5291625}
    }
    
  • Mouhamad Ibrahim
    Philippe Nain
    Iacopo Carreras
    Year: 2009
    Analysis of Relay Protocols for Throwbox--Equipped DTNs
    WIOPT
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/WIOPT.2009.5291625
Mouhamad Ibrahim1,*, Philippe Nain1,*, Iacopo Carreras2,*
  • 1: INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
  • 2: CREATE-NET Trento, Italy
*Contact email: mibrahim@sophia.inria.fr, philippe.nain@inria.fr, icarreras@create-net.org

Abstract

This paper addresses the design and performance evaluation of relay strategies for opportunistic Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) augmented with throwboxes. By opportunistic we mean that a node does not have any knowledge regarding its past and future contact opportunities with the other nodes. We consider a network model composed of both mobile relay nodes and throwboxes, where throwboxes are stationary wireless devices acting simply as fixed relays. We propose and evaluate various relay strategies, where the goal is to take advantage of the presence of throwboxes to minimize resources consumption at mobile nodes. Under Markovian assumptions we introduce a mathematical framework which allows us to calculate the main performance metrics (average delivery delay, overhead, etc.) of each proposed relay scheme. The obtained results highlight the various trade-offs that are left to network designers when adding throwboxes to a DTN, and draw insights on the effectiveness of these strategies.