Impact of information availability on starvation mitigation and delay minimal delivery in ICRCNs

This paper looks into an Intermittently Connected Roadside Communication Network (ICRCN) scenario comprising two isolated source Stationary Roadside Units (SRUs) relying on mobile smart vehicles to relay data to a destination SRU. In this case, it was shown in [1] that the downstream source SRU may suffer from a significant starvation problem. As such, a Markov decision process framework was established therein to identify a suitable Bulk Release Decision Policy (BRDP). BRDP was then implemented within a Starvation Mitigation and Delay-Minimal (SMDM) delivery scheme. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the level of information availability at the upstream non-starving node on the performance of the SMDM scheme. In particular, extensive simulations are conducted for the purpose of quantifying the ability of SMDM to jointly mitigate starvation and achieve minimal end-to-end bundle delivery delay under conditions of perfect, imperfect, and no information availability at the nonstarving node.