Contention-aware analysis of routing schemes for mobile opportunistic networks

Abstract

A large body of work has theoretically analyzed the performance of routing schemes for mobile opportunistic networks. But a vast majority of these prior studies have ignored wireless contention. Recent papers have shown through simulations that ignoring contention leads to inaccurate and misleading results, even when studying sparse networks. In this paper, we analyze the performance of routing schemes under contention. To model contention we use our recently-proposed analytical framework which is applicable to any multi-hop wireless network. Then, we take into consideration the special characteristics of mobile opportunistic networks and compute the delays for four representative routing schemes for these networks. Finally, we use these delay expressions to answer practical questions in the context of designing more efficient routing schemes for mobile opportunistic networks.