Optimal mobility control with energy constraint in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Owing to the uncertainty of transmission opportunities between mobile nodes, the routing in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) exploits the mechanism of store-carry-and-forward. In this routing mechanism, mobility plays an important role, and we need to control the mobility of nodes around the network to help with carrying messages from the source to the destination. This is a difficult problem because the nodes in the network may move arbitrarily and it is difficult for us to determine when the nodes should move faster to help the data transmission while considering the complicated energy consumption in such a network. At the same time, for most DTNs, the system energy is limited, and energy efficient algorithms are crucial to maximizing the message delivery probability while reducing the delivery cost. In this paper, we investigate the problem of energy efficient mobility speed control in epidemic routing of DTN. We model the message dissemination process under variable mobility speed by a continuous-time Markov model. With this model, we then formulate the optimization problem of the optimal mobility control for epidemic routing and obtain the optimal policy from the solution of this optimization problem. Furthermore, extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed optimal policy significantly outperforms the static policy with constant speed, in terms of energy saving. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.