Capacity of Place Based Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks exploits opportunistic contacts among mobile devices to facilitate data forwarding. In this paper, we focus on visited places of the mobiles and resulting opportunistic yet relative stable contacts within the places. We focus on investigating the capacity of this place based opportunistic network. We reveal that the capacity of the network is mainly determined by two factors, the message exchanges at the places and the people flow among the places. We propose a two-layer model to analyze this problem. In the first layer, a mixed form queueing network model is constructed to compute the population in each place and also the visitor arrival rate as well as visiting probability to each place. After this, in the second layer we transform the results from first layer into node capacity and link capacity which in turn will be used to calculate the network capacity. We perform simulation experiments to study the theoretical results.