Performance evaluation of a DTN as a city-wide infrastructure network

As providing data networks in an urban district through a cellular system is expensive and does not provide sufficient capacity, use of a wireless mesh network is generally considered as a way to achieve more capacity. While a mesh network has sizable installation costs to deploy routers and still does not provide abundant capacity, it is worthwhile to consider a DTN whose capacity is abundant without additional installation costs to support a mesh network. In this paper, we propose an architecture of a DTN as an infrastructure network and study the capacity region of the DTN over the real mobility of Shanghai taxies. We identify and verify several key characteristics of the DTN capacity, including time-varying and asymmetric characteristics. Our simulation results show that the capacity of the DTN is superior to a mesh network most of the time for both single-link and multi-link scenarios.