Energy Saving and Network Connectivity Tradeoff in Opportunistic Mobile Networks

In Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OppNets), a large amount of energy is consumed by idle listening, instead of infrequent data exchanging. This makes energy saving become a serious problem in OppNets, as nodes are typically with limited energy supplies. Duty-cycle operation is a promising approach for energy saving in OppNets, however, it may cause the degradation of network connectivity. Therefore, there exists a trade-off relationship between energy saving and network connectivity in duty-cycle OppNets. In this paper, the authors propose a model to quantify the contact probability (a metric of connectivity) in duty-cycle OppNets based on the realistic mobility trace.