Network coding based transmission schemes in DTNs with group meetings

Most existing studies on Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) consider pair-wise node encountering that assumes nodes only meet in pairs. In many mobile wireless networks, a group of nodes, instead of only a pair of nodes, may meet each other. In this paper, we study how to effectively transmit a set of packets from a source to a destination in such group meeting scenarios. The optimization goal is to minimize the delay for the packets to reach the destination while limiting the energy consumption. We first assume that node encountering is known beforehand, and develop an algorithm to obtain the minimum delay. We then develop two practical network coding based schemes. Both schemes use a token technique to limit the total number of transmissions, and only incur signaling at the beginning of a group meeting. One scheme requires nodes in a group to exchange their encoding matrices with each other, while the other only requires exchanging rank information. Simulation results demonstrate that both schemes achieve delays close to the minimum delay for moderate number of tokens. They present different tradeoffs in the number of transmissions and the signaling overhead.