Analysing delay-tolerant networks with correlated mobility

Abstract

Given a mobility pattern that entails intermittent wireless ad hoc connectivity, what is the best message delivery ratio and latency that can be achieved for a delay-tolerant routing protocol? We address this question by introducing a general scheme for deriving the routing latency distribution for a given mobility trace. Prior work on determining latency distributions has focused on models where the node mobility is characterised by independent contacts between nodes. We demonstrate through simulations with synthetic and real data traces that such models fail to predict the routing latency for cases with heterogeneous and correlated mobility. We demonstrate that our approach, which is based on characterising mobility through a colouring process, achieves a very good fit to simulated results also for such complex mobility patterns. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.