Phase transitions of opportunistic communication
Pan Hui, Anders Lindgren · 2008
In this paper, we study the utility of opportunistic communication systems with the co-existence of network infrastructure. We study how some important performance metrics change with varying degrees of infrastructure and mobile nodes willing to participate in the opportunistic forwarding. In doing so, we observe phase transitions in the utility of infrastructure and opportunistic forwarding respectively at different points in the design space. We discuss the implications that this has for the design of future network deployments and how this observation can be used to improve network performance, while keeping cost at a minimum.