Study of a bus-based disruption-tolerant network: mobility modeling and impact on routing

By Xiaolan (Ellen) Zhang, J. Kurose, Brian Neil Levine, D. Towsley, Honggang Zhang. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2007

432 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study traces taken from UMass DieselNet, a Disruption-Tolerant Network consisting of WiFi nodes attached to buses. As buses travel their routes, they encounter other buses and in some cases are able to establish pair-wise connections and transfer data between them. We analyze the bus-to-bus contact traces to characterize the contact process between buses and its impact on DTN routing performance. We find that the all-bus-pairs aggregated inter-contact times show no discernible pattern. However, the inter-contact times aggregated at a route level exhibit periodic behavior.Based on analysis of the deterministic inter-meeting times for bus pairs running on route pairs, and consideration of the variability in bus movement and the random failures to establish connections, we construct generative route-level models that capture the above behavior. Through trace-driven simulations of epidemic routing, we find that the epidemic performance predicted by traces generated with this finer-grained route-level model is much closer to the actual performance that would be realized in the operational system than traces generated using the coarse-grained all-bus-pairs aggregated model. This suggests the importance in choosing the rightlevel of model granularity when modelingmobility-related measures such as inter-contact times in DTNs.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef8d4801fd4e9e42d6eccb6ddf0705d3e6ee9638

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

A Survey of Social-Based Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks: Positive and Negative Social Effects (2013, background): “[21], [22], mobile social networks [23]–[27], disease epidemic spread monitoring and pocket switched networks (PSNs) [28]),”
Cabernet: vehicular content delivery using WiFi (2008, background): “They have studied protocols for bus-to-bus routing in delay tolerant networks [7] as well as measurements and models of bus-to-bus connectivity [28].”
Time-varying graphs and dynamic networks (2010, background): “Example of carrier networks and opportunistic mobility usages include: Cabernet, currently deployed in 10 taxis running in the Boston area [28], which allows to deliver messages and files to users in cars; and UMass DieselNet, consisting of WiFi nodes attached to 40 buses in Amherst, used for routin”
DTN: an architectural retrospective (2008, background): “For routing, although a significant number of approaches have been discussed in the literature, relatively few have been demonstrated in live implementations (see [20] and [21] for notable exceptions), and none have been demonstrated at large scale in realistic environments.”