Routing based on delivery distributions in predictable disruption tolerant networks

This article studies disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) where each node knows the probabilistic distribution of contacts with other nodes. It proposes a framework that allows one to formalize the behaviour of such a network. It generalizes extreme cases that have been studied before where (a) either nodes only know their contact frequency with each other or (b) they have a perfect knowledge of who meets who and when. This paper then gives an example of how this framework can be used; it shows how one can find a packet forwarding algorithm optimized to meet the ‘delay/bandwidth consumption’ tradeoff: packets are duplicated so as to (statistically) guarantee a given delay or delivery probability, but not too much so as to reduce the bandwidth, energy, and memory consumption.