Performance analysis of copy-limited Epidemic Routing in delay tolerant networks

ER (Epidemic Routing) is a very important routing method in DTN (delay tolerant networks) and it reduces delay through replication, but too many copies will consume a high amount of bandwidth and energy. Thus, a very high cost may be the price for the expected performance gain, or, even worse, these schemes may result in poor performance due to high contention for limited resources, so we should constrain the number of the copies. In order to select suitable copies and acquire anticipated performance, we need to know the connection between the performance and the number of repetitions. Using the Markovian model, we build the model of the number of copies and the average transmission delay, simulation shows the correctness of the model.