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