Impacts of Entropy on Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

DTNs exhibit some degree of regularity on their temporal contact patterns \cite{Clauset2007}. The impact of this regularity on network performances has not been well studied and analyzed. In this paper, we study this temporal dimension of DTNs and its impacts on routing performances. We propose a simple parametric network model which capture the entropy of a DTN, covering the full spectrum of contact patterns from strictly periodic to fully random ones. Based on this model, we study the impact of the entropy on routing performances and we show how to exploit the entropy to forward data with a good resource/performance tradeoff in DTNs. Simulation and analytical analysis show that efficient routing with respect to their entropy emerge within a subset of DTNs. Moreover, we show there is a specific entropy value where routing performance achieves its optimum.