End-to-end vs. hop-by-hop transport under intermittent connectivity

This paper revisits the fundamental trade-off between endto-end and hop-by-hop transport control. The end-to-end principle has been one of the building blocks of the Internet; but in real-world wireless scenarios, end-to-end connectivity is often intermittent, limiting the performance of end-to-end transport protocols. We use a stochastic model that captures both the availability ratio of links and the duration of link disruptions to represent intermittent connectivity. We compare the performance of end-to-end and hop-by-hop transport over an intermittently-connected path. End-toend, perhaps surprisingly, may perform better than hop-byhop transport under long disruption periods. We propose the spaced hop-by-hop policy which is found to dominate (in terms of delivery ratio) the end-to-end policy over the whole parameter range and the basic hop-by-hop policy over most of the relevant range.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AUTONOMICS
• Authors: Simon Heimlicher, Merkourios Karaliopoulos, Hanoch Levy, Martin May
• Keywords: AUTONOMICS 2007, Communications, End-to-end Connectivity, End-to-end Transport Protocols, Hop-by-hop Transport