An energy-aware deadline-constrained message delivery in delay-tolerant networks

In order to understand the message dissemination performance in delay-tolerant networks, much analysis work has been proposed in literature. However, existing work shares a common simplification that the pairwise inter-meeting time between any two mobile nodes is exponentially distributed. Not mention the fact that such assumption is only an approximation, it cannot be applied by network planners to directly control the mobile nodes for any network optimization, e.g., energy efficiency. It is quite significant to study the relationship between the network performance with the parameters that can be adjusted directly to tackle the limitations of current exponential distribution assumption based analysis. Therefore, in this paper, we are motivated to jointly consider the transmission range and messages residence time to stochastically analyze deadline-constrained message delivery ratio utilizing a controlled epidemic routing. The message propagation is considered as an age-structure process and described by a susceptible–infectious–recovered model, which is then analyzed using delay differential equations. Since both the transmission range and the message residence time are related to the mobile nodes’ energy consumption, we further apply our analysis framework to investigate the tradeoff between the energy consumption and the achievable message delivery ratio. The correctness and accuracy of our analysis are validated by extensive simulations.