Performance Analysis of Homing Pigeon based Delay Tolerant Networks

This paper presents and analyzes a new type of delay tolerant network where each node owns a dedicated messenger (called a pigeon). The only form of inter-node communication is for a pigeon to periodically carry a batch of messages originated at the home node, deliver them to the corresponding destination nodes and return home. Clearly, given message expiration times, some messages may not reach their destinations by the deadline. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, we study the relationship between the arrival rate (at the home node), batch size, expiration time and delivery ratio (the percentage of messages reaching destinations before they expire) of messages. The simplistic assumptions we make render the problem tractable, and help us gather experience in this topic.