HYMAD: Hybrid DTN-MANET Routing for Dense and Highly Dynamic Wireless Networks

In this paper we propose HYMAD, a Hybrid DTN-MANET routing protocol which uses DTN between disjoint groups of nodes while using MANET routing within these groups. HYMAD is fully decentralized and only makes use of topological information exchanges between the nodes. We evaluate the scheme in simulation by replaying real life traces which exhibit this highly dynamic connectivity. The results show that HYMAD outperforms the multi-copy Spray-and-Wait DTN routing protocol it extends, both in terms of delivery ratio and delay, for any number of message copies. Our conclusion is that such a Hybrid DTN-MANET approach offers a promising venue for the delivery of elastic data in mobile ad-hoc networks as it retains the resilience of a pure DTN protocol while significantly improving performance.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

The heterogeneity of inter-contact time distributions: its importance for routing in delay tolerant networks

Prior work on routing in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) has commonly made the assumption that each pair of nodes shares the same inter-contact time distribution as every other pair. The main argument in this paper is that researchers should also be looking at heterogeneous inter-contact time distributions. We demonstrate the presence of such heterogeneity in the often-used Dartmouth Wi-Fi data set. We also show that DTN routing can benefit from knowing these distributions. We first introduce a new stochastic model focusing on the inter-contact time distributions between all pairs of nodes, which we validate on real connectivity patterns. We then analytically derive the mean delivery time for a bundle of information traversing the network for simple single copy routing schemes. The purpose is to examine the theoretic impact of heterogeneous inter-contact time distributions. Finally, we show that we can exploit this user diversity to improve routing performance.Comment: 6 page

Evaluating Mobility Pattern Space Routing for DTNs

Because a delay tolerant network (DTN) can often be partitioned, the problem of routing is very challenging. However, routing benefits considerably if one can take advantage of knowledge concerning node mobility. This paper addresses this problem with a generic algorithm based on the use of a high-dimensional Euclidean space, that we call MobySpace, constructed upon nodes' mobility patterns. We provide here an analysis and the large scale evaluation of this routing scheme in the context of ambient networking by replaying real mobility traces. The specific MobySpace evaluated is based on the frequency of visit of nodes for each possible location. We show that the MobySpace can achieve good performance compared to that of the other algorithms we implemented, especially when we perform routing on the nodes that have a high connection time. We determine that the degree of homogeneity of mobility patterns of nodes has a high impact on routing. And finally, we study the ability of nodes to learn their own mobility patterns.Comment: IEEE INFOCOM 2006 preprin

Plausible Mobility: Inferring Movement from Contacts

We address the difficult question of inferring plausible node mobility based only on information from wireless contact traces. Working with mobility information allows richer protocol simulations, particularly in dense networks, but requires complex set-ups to measure, whereas contact information is easier to measure but only allows for simplistic simulation models. In a contact trace a lot of node movement information is irretrievably lost so the original positions and velocities are in general out of reach. We propose a fast heuristic algorithm, inspired by dynamic force-based graph drawing, capable of inferring a plausible movement from any contact trace, and evaluate it on both synthetic and real-life contact traces. Our results reveal that (i) the quality of the inferred mobility is directly linked to the precision of the measured contact trace, and (ii) the simple addition of appropriate anticipation forces between nodes leads to an accurate inferred mobility.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Using Neighborhood Beyond One Hop in Disruption-Tolerant Networks

Most disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) protocols available in the literature have focused on mere contact and intercontact characteristics to make forwarding decisions. Nevertheless, there is a world behind contacts: just because one node is not in contact with some potential destination, it does not mean that this node is alone. There may be interesting end-to-end transmission opportunities through other nearby nodes. Existing protocols miss such possibilities by maintaining a simple contact-based view of the network. In this paper, we investigate how the vicinity of a node evolves through time and whether such information can be useful when routing data. We observe a clear tradeoff between routing performance and the cost for monitoring the neighborhood. Our analyses suggest that limiting a node's neighborhood view to three or four hops is more than enough to significantly improve forwarding efficiency without incurring prohibitive overhead.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl