Energy savings in opportunistic networks

A major challenge in mobile wireless devices for opportunistic networks is to minimize the energy consumption. The minimization however should not come at a cost of reduced application throughput (i.e. goodput). This work evaluates the potential performance gains for mobile nodes that adopt a duty-cycling scheme in an opportunistic context. We present an analytical framework for evaluating the energy consumption of nodes based on a probabilistic estimation of effective contact durations, and we validate this framework on a mobility scenario. We further perform extensive trace-driven simulations and demonstrate that a duty-cycling scheme considerably improves the performance of opportunistic content distribution systems by decreasing the energy consumption without significantly affecting the goodput.