Exploiting Heterogeneity in Mobile Opportunistic Networks: An Analytic Approach

Heterogeneity arises in a wide range of scenarios in mobile opportunistic networks and is one of key factors that govern the performance of packet forwarding algorithms. While the heterogeneity has been empirically investigated and exploited in the design of new forwarding algorithms, it has been typically ignored or marginalized when it comes to rigorous performance analysis of such algorithms. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to quantify the performance gain achievable by exploiting the heterogeneity in mobile nodes´ contact dynamics. In particular, we derive a delay upper bound of a heterogeneity-aware forwarding policy per a given number of message copies and obtain its closed-form expression, which enables our quantitative study on the benefit of leveraging underlying heterogeneity structure in the design of forwarding algorithms. We then analytically show that less than 20% of total (unlimited) message copies is only enough under various heterogeneous network settings to achieve the same delay as that obtained using the unlimited message copies when the networks become homogeneous. We also provide independent simulation results including real trace-driven evaluation to support our analytical results.