The impact of message lifetime on Delay-Tolerant Networks with non-cooperative nodes

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) routing protocols assume that nodes are cooperative to forward packets to other nodes. In real world, however, most of the nodes are non-cooperative because of resource and energy constrains. In this paper, we consider node cooperation in sending and receiving a message with probability ps and pr, respectively. We model this node cooperation behavior by using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and study impact of message lifetime (Et) on performance of the Two-Hop Routing (2HR) and Epidemic Routing (ER). We validate our model by extensive simulations. Results show that for lower Et delivery delay is same irrespective of node cooperation.