A Uniform Utility Function for Delay and Disruption Tolerant Mobile Internet Access Service

Utility function recently has been adopted in network studies to describe quality of service. However, the existing utility functions focus only on the effect of power or throughput, so are not suitable to delay and disruption tolerant networking (DTN), where delay and disruption have major impacts on the utility and cannot be ignored. This paper proposes a corresponding sigmoid utility function, which takes into account of the delay and disruption factors. The analytics of the utility function on different services shows that the new function is effective in the context of DTN. Moreover, there does still not exist a uniform general utility function for diversified network services in form. After analyzed current utility functions on constant bit rate service, variable bit rate service and asynchronous and synchronization services, amendments or deformations were made to put forward a uniform general utility function of all of the above as a conclusion.