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Scheduling Messengers in Disconnected Clustered Mobile Networks
Khaled A. Harras and Kevin C. Almeroth

The evolution of wireless devices along with the increase in user mobility have created new network challenges such as partitioning and intermittent connectivity. Establishing communication amongst these challenges has led to an evolutionary form of disconnected mobile networks which we present in this paper, dubbed Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks (DTMNs). Nodes in DTMNs often form clusters, which we define as regions. Nodes within each region have end-to-end paths between them, but there is only limited connectivity between regions. Both regions, as well as nodes within a region, can be either stationary or mobile. For such environments, we propose using a dedicated set of messengers that relay message bundles between these regions. Our goal is to understand how messenger scheduling can be used to improve network performance and connectedness. We develop several classes of messenger ownership strategies and scheduling algorithms which can be used to achieve inter-regional communication in DTMNs. We use analysis and simulation to better understand the performance and tradeoffs between these algorithms.

Keywords: Delay tolerant networks, mobile networks, scheduling.

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