How disorder impacts routing in human-centric disruption tolerant networks

Human-Centric DTNs exhibit some degree of regularity on their temporal contact patterns. The impact of this regularity on network performances has not been well studied and analyzed. In this paper, we study this temporal dimension of Human-Centric DTNs and its impacts on routing performances. We propose a simple parametric network model which covers the full spectrum of contact patterns from strictly periodic to fully random ones. Based on this model, we study the impact of contact patterns regularity on routing performances and we show how to exploit the temporal structure to navigate with a good resource/performance tradeoff in Human-Centric DTNs. Simulation and analytical analysis show that efficient routing with respect to their degree of regularity emerge within a subset of dynamic networks. Moreover, we show there is a specific degree of regularity where routing performance achieves its optimum.