Decentralized Stochastic Control of Delay Tolerant Networks

—We study in this paper optimal stochastic control issues in delay tolerant networks. We first derive the structure of optimal two-hop forwarding policies. In order to be implemented, such policies require the knowledge of some system parameters such as the number of mobiles or the rate of contacts between mobiles, but these could be unknown at system design time or may change over time. To address this problem, we design adaptive policies combining estimation and control that allow to achieve optimal performance in spite of the lack of information. We then study interactions that may occur in the presence of several competing classes of mobiles and formulate this as a costcoupled stochastic game. We show that this game has a unique Nash equilibrium where each class adopts the optimal forwarding policy determined for the single class problem.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Eitan Altman, Giovanni Neglia, Francesco De Pellegrini, Daniele Miorandi
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2009, Optimal Forwarding Policy, Optimal Stochastic Control, Optimal Two-hop Forwarding