Optimal Multi-Frame Message Transmission for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

In order to provide communication service in the Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks (ICMN) where there is only intermittent connectivity between mobile nodes, a variety of epidemic-style routing algorithms have been proposed to achieve high message delivery probability. However, current works do not address the realistic environment that a message is split into multi frames to be transmitted. In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimal multi-frame message transmission for the ICMN. First, we formulate the optimization problem by introducing a continuous time Markov framework. Then, we theoretically derive the optimal policies for the message transmission by solving the formulated problem. Finally, we investigate the performance of the proposed optimal policies through extensive numerical results. We conclude that our optimal policies give the best performance in the multi-frame message transmission.