1st International ICST Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communication Systems

Research Article

Characterizing Pairwise Inter-contact Patterns in Delay Tolerant Networks

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.AUTONOMICS2007.2131,
        author={Vania Conan and J\^{e}r\^{e}mie Leguay and Timur Friedman},
        title={Characterizing Pairwise Inter-contact Patterns in Delay Tolerant Networks},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Conference on Autonomic Computing and Communication Systems},
        publisher={ICST},
        proceedings_a={AUTONOMICS},
        year={2007},
        month={10},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.AUTONOMICS2007.2131}
    }
    
  • Vania Conan
    Jérémie Leguay
    Timur Friedman
    Year: 2007
    Characterizing Pairwise Inter-contact Patterns in Delay Tolerant Networks
    AUTONOMICS
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.AUTONOMICS2007.2131
Vania Conan1, Jérémie Leguay2, Timur Friedman3
  • 1: Thales Communications
  • 2: Thales Communications,Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LiP6–CNRS
  • 3: Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LiP6–CNRS

Abstract

A good understanding of contact patterns in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is elemental to the design of effective routing or content distribution schemes. Prior work has typically focused on inter-contact time patterns in the aggregate. In this paper, we argue that pairwise inter-contact patterns are a more refined and efficient tool for characterizing DTNs. First, we provide a detailed statistical analysis of pairwise contact and inter-contact times in three reference DTN data sets. We characterize heterogeneities in contact times and inter-contact times, and find that the empirical distributions of inter-contact times tend to be well fitted by log-normal curves, with exponential curves also fitting a significant portion of the distributions. Second, we investigate analytically the relationship between pairwise and aggregate inter-contact times. In particular, we consider both the exponential and log-normal cases and show analytically how the aggregation of pairwise inter-contacts may lead to aggregate inter-contacts with power laws of various degrees.