Study of a bus-based disruption-tolerant network: mobility modeling and impact on routing

  • Authors:
  • Xiaolan Zhang;Jim Kurose;Brian Neil Levine;Don Towsley;Honggang Zhang

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts;University of Massachusetts;University of Massachusetts;University of Massachusetts;Suffolk University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We study traces taken from UMass DieselNet, a Disruption-Tolerant Network consisting of WiFi nodes attached to buses. As buses travel their routes, they encounter other buses and in some cases are able to establish pair-wise connections and transfer data between them. We analyze the bus-to-bus contact traces to characterize the contact process between buses and its impact on DTN routing performance. We find that the all-bus-pairs aggregated inter-contact times show no discernible pattern. However, the inter-contact times aggregated at a route level exhibit periodic behavior.Based on analysis of the deterministic inter-meeting times for bus pairs running on route pairs, and consideration of the variability in bus movement and the random failures to establish connections, we construct generative route-level models that capture the above behavior. Through trace-driven simulations of epidemic routing, we find that the epidemic performance predicted by traces generated with this finer-grained route-level model is much closer to the actual performance that would be realized in the operational system than traces generated using the coarse-grained all-bus-pairs aggregated model. This suggests the importance in choosing the rightlevel of model granularity when modelingmobility-related measures such as inter-contact times in DTNs.