The diameter of opportunistic mobile networks

Portable devices have more data storage and increasing communication capabilities everyday. In addition to classic infrastructure based communication, these devices can exploit human mobility and opportunistic contacts to communicate. We analyze the characteristics of such opportunistic forwarding paths. We establish that opportunistic mobile networks in general are characterized by a small diameter, a destination device is reachable using only a small number of relays under tight delay constraint. This property is first demonstrated analytically on a family of mobile networks which follow a random graph process. We then establish a similar result empirically with four data sets capturing human mobility, using a new methodology to efficiently compute all the paths that impact the diameter of an opportunistic mobile networks. We complete our analysis of network diameter by studying the impact of intensity of contact rate and contact duration. This work is, to our knowledge, the first v...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Augustin Chaintreau, Abderrahmen Mtibaa, Laurent Massoulié, Christophe Diot
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2007, Human Mobility, Opportunistic, Opportunistic Mobile Networks