An Analytical Model of Epidemic Routing with Immunity for Disruption Tolerant Networks

Abstract

We study the epidemic routing scheme with an immunity mechanism. The immunity mechanism enables more efficient utilization of limited buffer space at the nodes, by allowing nodes to remove outstanding copies of messages that have already been delivered. We develop a new analytical model for estimating the message delivery ratio (MDR) and the average delivery delay (ADD) under a variant of epidemic routing with the immunity mechanism, which we call an immunity routing scheme (IRS). The proposed model is based on a continuous-time Markov chain and takes into finite buffer sizes at the nodes.