Performance Analysis of Epidemic Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks with Overlapping Communities and Selfish Nodes

Abstract

Routing in delay tolerant networks (DTN) adopts the store-carry-forward mode, and it requires nodes to forward data in a cooperative way. However, nodes may be not willing to help others in many applications and this behavior can be called as individual selfish . On the other hand, nodes often can be divided into different communities, and nodes in the same community often have some social ties. Due to these social ties, nodes are more willing to help the one in the same community, but not others. This behavior can be called as social selfish . Note that some nodes may belong to more than one community in the real world, and this phenomenon makes the network have overlapping communities. This paper proposed a theoretical model by the continuous time Markov process to describe the performance of epidemic routing (ER) in such network. Simulation results show the accuracy of our model. Numerical results show that the selfish nature can make the performance of the routing policy be worse, but those nodes belonging to multi-communities can decrease the impact of the selfish nature in some degree.