Performance of Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks and its improvement using mobile relay nodes under buffer constraint

The performance of Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks (DTMNs) depends on the mobility pattern through the nodes encounter process which constitutes opportunities for exchange of information between nodes. However, the exchange of information itself depends also on the routing/replication protocol and the network ressources as the node buffer capacity and which determines the effective network performance. We focus in this work on those two concepts: encounter and exchange, and evaluate them along with resulting network performance for different mobility patterns and routing protocols as well as under the limited buffer space constraint. We also propose the use of additional, mobile, dedicated relays so as to enhance the performance of the DTMN in cases of ill-behaved mobility schemes.