How Mobility Models Affect the Design of Network Coding Schemes for Disruption Tolerant Networks

Mobile nodes in some challenging network scenarios suffer from intermittent connectivity and frequent partitions e.g. battlefield and disaster recovery scenarios. Disruption tolerant network (DTN) technologies are designed to enable nodes in such environments to communicate with one another. Recently, network coding schemes for DTN has been proposed. However, these schemes work well only in scenarios with homogeneous mobility models. In this paper, we propose an efficient context-aware network coding (CANCO) scheme for DTNs that achieves higher delivery ratio than the existing published network coding schemes in networks where nodes move according to non-homogeneous mobility models. We also show that our scheme delivers 300% more messages with higher data efficiency than a MORE-like scheme because our scheme does not suffer from the stop-and-wait feature in the MORE protocol.