A DTN packet forwarding scheme inspired by thermodynamics

We study a delay tolerant network where nodes move according to heterogeneous mobility. Nodes generate messages that need to be delivered to a gateway or a sink in the network. In order to capture mobility patterns of the nodes, we introduce the notion of temperature for each node, which reflects the amount of messages the node can deliver towards the sink. The temperature of the nodes is governed by a set of simple rules that are analogous to the principles that govern the transfer of heat between objects. We show several desirable properties possessed by the temperature of the nodes, and based on the observations, propose a novel distributed packet forwarding scheme for DTNs.