Temporal random walk as a lightweight communication infrastructure for opportunistic networks

This paper explores the idea of sharing a common storage unit (token) as a lightweight communication infrastructure for opportunistic networks. Instead of using contacts as opportunities to transfer messages, we use them to pass the token over time. We implement a Temporal Random Walk (TRW) process to support such evolution. Sending a message is equivalent to copying it in the token and passing the token to a connected node. Eventually the recipient node will get the token and all its addressed messages. We study our approach using both synthetic and real traces. We show that it can be equivalent to common routing strategies in terms of delivery ratio and delay.