Performance of a lamp post wireless backbone with Delay Tolerant offload

This paper presents a preliminary work based on the idea of offloading part of the traffic carried by a wireless multi-hop backbone on the lamp posts on a urban street to improve its throughput. Under some circumstances one or more nodes of the backbone may be congested, this could lead to packet losses. In order to overcome this situations, the backbone may decide to offload part of its traffic to the mobile nodes on the street (pedestrians and vehicles). These nodes form a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) that delivers the offloaded data to the sink. Within this paper we characterise advances that the DTN offload brings to the performance of such a system under different operational conditions.