Copy limited flooding over opportunistic networks

Mobile devices with local wireless interfaces can be organized into opportunistic networks which exploit communication opportunities arising from the movement of their users. With the proliferation and increasing capabilities of these devices, it is significant to investigate message dissemination over opportunistic networks to maximize the potential of those networks. In this paper, we analyze the performance of copy-limited flooding over opportunistic networks, where each node can only send no more than k copies of the same message. For this purpose, we propose a network model called Markov and Random graph Hierarchic Model (MRHM), where a node transfers among different Main-areas (places frequently visited by nodes) according to the Markov rule, and two different nodes in the same Main-area can establish a connection with a certain probability. We theoretically analyze the performance of k-copy limited flooding over MRHM in terms of delivery rate and delay. Our extensive experiments over MRHM and real traces reveal that when k equals 3, the performance of k-copy limited flooding is very close to that of Epidemic Routing.