The impact of message lifetime on Delay-Tolerant Networks with non-cooperative nodes

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) routing protocols assume that nodes are cooperative to forward packets to other nodes. In real world, however, most of the nodes are non-cooperative because of resource and energy constrains. In this paper, we consider node cooperation in sending and receiving a message with probability p_s and p_r, respectively. We model this node cooperation behavior by using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and study impact of message lifetime (Et) on performance of the Two-Hop Routing (2HR) and Epidemic Routing (ER). We validate our model by extensive simulations. Results show that for lower E_t delivery delay is same irrespective of node cooperation.