Understanding the Capacity and Delay Scaling Laws of Delay Tolerant Networks : A Unified Approach

Mobile wireless networks with intermittent connectivity, often called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), have recently received a lot of attention because of their applicability in various applications. It has been shown that DTN routing and transport protocols can benefit from node mobility by letting the nodes carry and forward data to overcome partial connectivity. The scalability of DTN protocols is very important for protocol design and evaluation, yet so far little work has been done to study the scaling properties using a unified framework that formalizes the primary characteristics of a DTN, i.e., inter-contact behavior of nodes. In this paper, we represent DTNs as a class of wireless mobile networks with intermittent connectivity, where the inter-contact behavior of an arbitrary pair of nodes follows a homogeneous Poisson process. Using this DTN model, we make the following contributions. First, we generalize the throughput and delay scaling results of Grossglauser and Tse. Second, we introduce an optimal singlecopy/multi-hop relay routing scheme and report its capacity and delay scaling properties. Third, we analyze the impact of various network parameters and routing strategies (such as buffer constraints, data replication, intermittent connectivity, and node speed) on the capacity/delay scaling properties of DTNs. Finally, we validate our analytical results with a simulation study.

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