A framework for modeling delay performance of Network Coding based Epidemic Routing

Network Coding based Epidemic Routing (NECR) has been proposed to improve the data delivery efficiency in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). With NCER, data packets are not only replicated but also encoded while being forwarded to their destination. To better understand how NCER facilitates the transmission, in this paper, we present an analytical framework for modeling the data transmission delay performance of NCER in DTNs. Unlike previous work, our framework can accommodate the inaccuracy of a widely adopted assumption that each node carrying one or more encoded packets is able to transmit an innovative encoded packet to the node it encounters. Numerical results are presented to validate the accuracy of our analytical framework.