The impact of node velocity diversity on mobile opportunistic network performance

Mobile opportunistic network is a special kind of mobile ad hoc networks, in which nodes can communicate and interact with each other without a fixed communication infrastructure. Data dissemination between nodes utilizes a store-carry-forward paradigm. In this paper, we explore the impact of node velocity diversity on the performance of mobile opportunistic networks while keeping the average velocity of nodes consistent with each other. The numerical results indicate that greater node velocity diversity always implies longer average communication and the smaller number of communications within the constant total communication time. Thus, it is important to improve the performance of mobile opportunistic networks by adjusting the velocity diversity in response to the requirement of the network and in order to make full use of communication resources. In particular, we construct mathematical models to analyze node contact times and link numbers. Lastly, we verify the correctness of models and theories we proposed by using the Opportunistic Network Environment simulator.