Stochastic Analysis of Epidemic Routing Based Anycast in Throwbox-Equipped DTNs

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) has been regarded as an important complementary networking paradigm to existing infrastructure-based networks. Without infrastructure support, the mobile nodes in DTNs opportunistically explore the communication opportunities to disseminate messages. As a result, the DTNs are characterized and challenged by the intermittent connectivities. To enhance the connectivity in DTNs, pioneering researchers advocate deploying throw boxes as static relay nodes in DTNs. Existing studies on throw box-enhanced DTNs are mainly about unicast where a message is transmitted from one node to another. While in this paper, we mainly focus on any cast where a message is intended to be disseminated to a fixed number of mobile nodes in the network. We are interested in analyzing the delivery performance of any cast in throw box-equipped DTNs. To address this issue, we first propose a two-dimensional Markov Chain to describe the network dynamics and then use Ordinary Differential Equation (ODEs) to formally analyze such dynamics. Simulation results validate the high accuracy of our analysis.