Vicinity-based DTN Characterization

Tiphaine Phe-Neau (1, 2) , Marcelo Dias de Amorim (1, 2) , Vania Conan (3)

1 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences
2 NPA - Networks and Performance Analysis
3 Thales Communications [Colombes]

We relax the traditional definition of contact and intercontact times by bringing the notion of vicinity into the game. We propose to analyze disruption-tolerant networks (DTN) under the assumption that nodes are in k-contact when they remain within a few hops from each other and in k-intercontact otherwise (where k is the maximum number of hops characterizing the vicinity). We make interesting observations when analyzing several real-world and synthetic mobility traces. We detect a number of unexpected behaviors when analyzing k-contact distributions; in particular, we observe that in some datasets the average k-contact time decreases as we increase k. In fact, we observe that many nodes spend a non-negligible amount of time in each other's vicinity without coming into direct contact. We also show that a small k (typically between 3 and 4) is sufficient to capture most communication opportunities.

Mots clés: Disruption Tolerant Networks; vicinity; contact; intercontact; opportunistic networks

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Tiphaine Phe-Neau, Marcelo Dias de Amorim, Vania Conan. Vicinity-based DTN Characterization. The Third International Workshop on Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MobiOpp '12), Mar 2012, Zurich, Switzerland. pp.37-44, ⟨10.1145/2159576.2159586⟩. ⟨hal-00782636⟩