The Impact of Intercontact Time within Opportunistic Networks: Protocol Implications and Mobility Models

Opportunistic networking, where node mobility is utilized to achieve message delivery, has become an important class of mobile ad hoc networking. A critical component of performance analysis for opportunistic networking is a basic understanding of contact and inter-contact times for commonly studied mobility models. In this paper we give original results nodal contact-times and analytically show that inter-contact times of mobile nodes can be closely approximated as exponentially distributed in Random Waypoint and Random Direction mobility models. We then examine the effect of HELLO intervals on the observed inter-contact rate of nodes. Through extensive simulation study, we show that our analytical results for mobility characteristics are accurate.