Computing Conditional Intermeeting Time in Conditional Shortest Path Routing

Delay tolerant networks are characterized by the sporadic connectivity between their nodes. The Sporadic connectivity leads to lack of stable end-to-end paths from source to destination. Since the future node connections are mostly unknown in these networks, opportunistic forwarding is used to deliver messages. In Intermeeting time, to making effective forwarding decisions using only the network characteristics (i.e. average intermeeting time between nodes) but contact history extracted from previous node is a challenging problem. In this paper, the authors introduce a new method called conditional intermeeting time, which computes the average intermeeting time between two nodes relative to a meeting with a third node using only the local knowledge of the past contacts. Advantage of using conditional intermeeting time is time efficiency.