Characterizing pairwise inter-contact patterns in delay tolerant networks

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.

[1]  Jonghyun Kim,et al.  A Survey-Based Mobilty Model of People for Simulation of Urban Mesh Networks , 2005 .

[2]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Reality mining: sensing complex social systems , 2006, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[3]  Pan Hui,et al.  Impact of Human Mobility on the Design of Opportunistic Forwarding Algorithms , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[4]  Kevin C. Almeroth,et al.  Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks (DTMNs): Controlled Flooding in Sparse Mobile Networks , 2005, NETWORKING.

[5]  Cecilia Mascolo,et al.  A community based mobility model for ad hoc network research , 2006, REALMAN '06.

[6]  F. James.  Statistical Methods in Experimental Physics , 1973 .

[7]  Rabin K. Patra,et al.  Routing in a delay tolerant network , 2004, SIGCOMM '04.

[8]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Power Law and Exponential Decay of Intercontact Times between Mobile Devices , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[9]  William Feller,et al.  An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Vol. 2 , 1967 .

[10]  Imrich Chlamtac,et al.  A Framework for Opportunistic Forwarding in Disconnected Networks , 2006, 2006 Third Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking & Services.

[11]  Kevin R. Fall,et al.  A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.

[12]  H. L. Dryden,et al.  Investigations on the Theory of the Brownian Movement , 1957 .

[13]  Serge Fdida,et al.  Reconsidering microscopic mobility modeling for self-organizing networks , 2006, IEEE Network.

[14]  Guy Leduc,et al.  Predictable Disruption Tolerant Networks and Delivery Guarantees , 2006, ArXiv.

[15]  Matthias Grossglauser,et al.  Last Encounter Routing under Random Waypoint Mobility , 2004, NETWORKING.

[16]  E. Montroll,et al.  On 1/f noise and other distributions with long tails. , 1982, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  W. Reed.  The Pareto law of incomes—an explanation and an extension , 2003 .

[18]  Tristan Henderson,et al.  The changing usage of a mature campus-wide wireless network , 2008, Comput. Networks.

[19]  Cauligi S. Raghavendra,et al.  Single-copy routing in intermittently connected mobile networks , 2004, 2004 First Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2004. IEEE SECON 2004..

[20]  Ravi Jain,et al.  Evaluating location predictors with extensive Wi-Fi mobility data , 2004, INFOCOM.

[21]  David A. Maltz,et al.  Dynamic Source Routing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks , 1994, Mobidata.

[22]  Timur Friedman,et al.  Evaluating Mobility Pattern Space Routing for DTNs , 2005, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[23]  Mingyan Liu,et al.  Building realistic mobility models from coarse-grained traces , 2006, MobiSys '06.

[24]  Li Li,et al.  Practical Routing in Delay-Tolerant Networks , 2007, IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput..

[25]  Michael Mitzenmacher,et al.  A Brief History of Generative Models for Power Law and Lognormal Distributions , 2004, Internet Math..