Analysis of Mobile Opportunistic Networks using All Hops Optimal Paths

In this paper, we examine how the paths between any two nodes in a mobile opportunistic network change with increasing number of hops a message can follow. At the core of our analysis is the all hops optimal path (AHOP) problem that has been explored in the context of network capacity analysis of static networks. We represent the total delay of a route from a source node to a destination node as additive weight and use the number of encounters as a representation of bottleneck weight. For these two cases, we show how the paths between any two nodes are affected using human contact traces. Our analysis shows that with only two hops all nodes become connected to all other nodes in the considered networks. However, the optimal paths are achieved at further hops, i.e, hop count ^Y 4. This result is also in line with a known phenomenon; the small world of human contact networks. Our finding is paramount as it puts an upper bound on the hop count for the hop restricted routing schemes by discovering the optimal hop count for both additive and bottleneck weights.