A Percolation-Based Approach to Model DTN Congestion Control

In this paper, we propose a novel modeling framework to study congestion in delay- and disruption tolerant networks (DTNs). The proposed model is based on directed site-bond percolation where sites represent space-time positions of DTN nodes, and bonds are contact opportunities, i.e. Communication links that can be established whenever nodes come in range of each other. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model of DTN congestion using percolation theory. The proposed modeling framework is simple yet general and can be used to evaluate different DTN congestion control mechanisms in a variety of scenarios and conditions. We validate our model by showing that its results match quite well results obtained from the ONE DTN simulation platform. We also show that our model can be used to understand how parameters like buffer management policy, buffer size, routing mechanism, and message time-to-live affect network congestion.