A Reaction-Diffusion Model for Epidemic Routing in Sparsely Connected MANETs

—We propose and investigate a deterministic traveling wave model for the progress of epidemic routing in disconnected mobile ad hoc networks. In epidemic routing, broadcast or unicast is achieved by exploiting mobility: message-carrying nodes “infect” non message-carrying nodes when they come within communication range of them. Early probabilistic analyses of epidemic routing follow a “well-mixed” model which ignores the spatial distribution of the infected nodes, and hence do not provide good performance estimates unless the node density is very low. More recent work has pointed out that the infection exhibits wave-like characteristics, but does not provide a detailed model of the wave propagation. In this paper, we model message propagation using a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation that has a traveling wave solution, and show that the performance predictions made by the model closely match simulations in regimes where the well-mixed model breaks down. In part...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Daniel J. Klein, João Pedro Hespanha, Upamanyu Madhow
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2010, Model, Node Density, Traveling Wave