A stochastic approach for modeling message dissemination in opportunistic networks

Abstract

The opportunistic networks have shown to be an interesting communicationinfrastructure for supporting mobile collaborative systems in several application scenarioslike disaster relief efforts, hospital work and tourism. The message delivery strategies usedin these networks affect in different ways the performance and energy consumption ofthese systems. Therefore, it is important to understand the message dissemination processin opportunistic networks to envision the impact that it will have on mobile collaborativesystems. Most approaches used to study the message dissemination in these networks usesimulations or empirical tests. Although useful, the first one requires an important mod-eling effort, and the second one involves high design and experimentation costs. This limitsour capability to evaluate alternatives for message dissemination and choose the mostappropriate one according to the features of the application scenario. In order to helpaddress this limitation, we propose a stochastic approach for modeling message dissemi-nation in opportunistic networks. This approach involves a low modeling and usage effortthat allows designers not only to compare several dissemination strategies, but also designparticular ones using an iterative process. The usability and usefulness of this approach isillustrated through the modeling and analysis of the dissemination process of two well-known message routing strategies. Although the results are still preliminary, they show thefeasibility of using this proposal, and opens several opportunities for studying these net-works and improving the mobile applications that use them.