Messages propagation control in Delay Tolerant Networks under epidemic routing protocol

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) has the potential to connect nodes in an environment where an end-to-end path may not be available between source and destination. Resources constraint is among the most serious issues in DTN. In this paper, we consider the scenario where we want to transmit an information (message) from a source to a group of people in the network area. Using the epidemic routing protocol the message can reach its destinations as fast as possible, but the protocol consumes too much resources. We model the messages propagation under the epidemic routing protocol by an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). And, we derive the optimal retention of a message by a node, taking into account that all nodes are infected. Simulations results show that, using the proposed optimal control in epidemic routing context, we can reach the same performances of epidemic routing while minimizing the resource consumption.