Modeling Opportunistic Data Delivery in Dynamic Wireless Networks

In this paper, the authors examine data delivery in dynamic wireless ad hoc networks that exchange packets opportunistically. Legacy Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) protocols send packets along a predetermined path between a source and a destination. Node mobility, however, may create network partitions and a multi-hop link may not be present at the onset. Such node mobility may instead be leveraged to create an asynchronous path between a source and destination enabling opportunistic message exchange. In this paper, they propose an analytic model for this data exchange by defining a node's probability to forward packets to an encountered node. Drawing on results from mobility studies, they derive the statistics on the packet exchange and packet delivery performance for opportunistic networks.