Performance modelling of opportunistic forwarding under heterogenous mobility

The Delay Tolerant Networking paradigm aims to enable communications in disconnected environments where traditional protocols would fail. Oppor- tunistic networks are delay tolerant networks whose nodes are typically the users' personal mobile devices. Communications in an opportunistic network rely on the mobility of users: each message is forwarded from node to node, according to a hop-by-hop decision process that selects the node that is better suited for bringing the message closer to its destination. Despite the variety of forwarding protocols that have been proposed in the recent years, there is no reference framework for the performance modelling of opportunistic for- warding. In this paper we start to ll this gap by proposing an analytical model for the rst two moments of the delay and the number of hops expe- rienced by messages when delivered in an opportunistic fashion. This model seamlessly integrates both social-aware and social-oblivious single-copy for- warding protocols, as well as dierent hypotheses for user contact dynamics. More specically, the model can be solved exactly in the case of exponential and Pareto inter-meeting times, two popular cases emerged from the liter- ature on human mobility analysis. In order to exemplify how the proposed framework can be used, we discuss its application to two case studies with dierent mobility settings. Finally, we discuss how the framework can be also solved exactly when inter-meeting times follow a hyper-exponential distribu- tion. This case is particularly relevant as hyper-exponential distributions are able to approximate the large class of high-variance distributions (distribu- tions with coecient of variation greater than one), which are those more challenging, e.g., from the delay standpoint.