Competition and Cooperation between Nodes in Delay Tolerant Networks with Two Hop Routing

This paper revisits the two-hop forwarding policy in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) and provides a rich study of their performance and optimization which includes (i) Derivation of closed form expressions for the main performance measures such as success delivery probability of a packet (or a message) within a given deadline. (ii) A study of competitive and cooperative operations of DTNs and derivation of the structure of optimal and of equilibrium policies. (iii) A study of the case in which the entity that is forwarded is a chunk rather than a whole message. For a message to be received successfully, all chunks of which it is composed have to arrive at the destination within the deadline. (iv) A study of the benefits of adding redundant chunks. (v) The convergence to the mean field limit.