Performance Modeling for Relay Cooperation in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) rely on the mobility of nodes and sequences of their contacts to compensate for lack of continuous connectivity and thus enable messages to be delivered from end to end in a “store-carry-forward” way, where multiple relay nodes are usually employed in the message delivery process. In this paper, we focus on such relay cooperation and analytically explore its impact on the delivery performance in DTNs. Specifically, we first develop a continuous time Markov chain-based theoretical framework to model the complicated message delivery process in delay tolerant networks adopting the two-hop relay algorithm. We then derive closed-form expressions for both the expected delivery delay and the corresponding expected delivery cost, where the important relay behaviors of forwarding traffic for itself or for other nodes are carefully incorporated into the analysis.