Energy-Aware Temporal Reachability Graphs for Time-Varying Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

With the rapid emergence of applications in Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MONs), understanding and characterizing their properties becomes extremely important. A fundamental model for MONs is time-varying graph, which currently remains poorly understood since many well-recognized properties of static graphs have no obvious counterpart in dynamic ones. In MONs, the dynamical links change opportunistically and usually the system energy is very limited, which results in unique and unknown properties about the network connectivity and reachability. In this paper, taking the communication energy into account, we introduce the concept of Energy-aware Temporal Reachability Graphs (ETRG), which characterizes the connectivity of MONs with the consideration of communication consumed energy, and consequently reveals the communication capabilities of MONs with the given of real-world system parameters of data size, tolerable delay, and energy budget. We come up with efficient algorithm to calculate ETRG from the corresponding time-varying graphs. By applying ETRG to several mobile networks recorded by real-life human and vehicular mobility traces, we characterize their network connectivity properties in terms of average reachability, communication asymmetry, and stability. Moreover, utilizing ETRG that places upper bounds of the communications capabilities, we reveal the fundamental relations and tradeoffs among large-scale variability of the system metrics of energy budget, tolerable delay, and data size on the system performance.