Performance Modeling of Epidemic Routing

Epidemic routing [18] has been proposed as an approach for routing in sparse and/or highly mobile networks in which there may not be a contemporaneous path from source to destination. Epidemic routing adopts a so-called “store-carry-forward” paradigm – a node receiving a packet buffers and carries that packet as it moves, passing the packet on to new nodes that it encounters. Analogous to the spread of infectious diseases, each time a packet-carrying node encounters a new node that does not have a copy of that packet, the carrier is said to infect this new node by passing on a packet copy; newly infected nodes, in turn, behave similarly. The destination receives the packet when it first meets an infected node. Epidemic routing is able to achieve minimum delivery delay at the expense of increased use of resources such as buffer space, bandwidth, and transmission power. Variations of epidemic routing have recently been proposed that exploit this trade-off between delivery delay and resource consumption, including -hop schemes [14, 3], probabilistic forwarding [11, 5], and spray-and-wait [17, 16].