A Framework for Routing Performance Analysis in Delay Tolerant Networks with Application to Non Cooperative Networks

In this paper, we present a framework for analyzing routing performance in delay tolerant networks. Differently from previous work, our framework is aimed at characterizing the exact distribution of relevant performance metrics, which is a substantial improvement over existing studies characterizing either the expected value of the metric, or an asymptotic approximation of the actual distribution. In particular, the considered performance metrics are packet delivery delay, and communication cost, expressed as number of copies of a packet circulating in the network at the time of delivery. Our proposed framework is based on a characterization of the routing process as a stochastic coloring process, and can be applied to model performance of most stateless delay tolerant routing protocols such as epidemic, two-hops, etc.