Performance evaluation of network coding in disruption tolerant networks

Delay/Disruptive Tolerant Network (DTN) differs from the traditional networks in that it has no continuous or contemporaneous connections but only intermittent connections among wireless nodes and thus it is viewed as an opportunistic networks. DTNs emerge as a good alternative to provide services to a variety of applications in highly challenged environments. However, the characteristics of DTNs make existing solutions infeasible to be applied directly and new solutions are required to be explored, such as multicast which has been extensively studied before in internet and mobile ad hoc networks. Network coding has been proved been proved as an efficient way to improve the performance of multicast in traditional networks. In this paper, we use simulations to study how multicast with network coding performs in DTNs in terms of delivery delay under various application requirements (i.e., the amount of content to distribute and the number of multicast group members) and the network settings (i.e., the popularity of the network and the contact rate). Some empirical results are provided in this paper as well.