On the Impact of Cut-Through Links in Epidemic Broadcasting

One of communication mechanisms in DTN is an epidemic broadcasting that performs information transmission from a certain mobile node to all other mobile nodes using short-distance radio communications (e.g., WiFi) among mobile nodes. In the literature, it has been shown through simulation experiments that the performance of an epidemic broadcasting improves significantly by not only utilizing ad-hoc communication among mobile nodes but also introducing a small number of cut-through links (i.e., wired communication links connecting several base stations) on the field. In this paper, the effect of deploying cut-through links on the performance (in particular, rapidity of message delivery) of epidemic broadcasting is quantitatively clarified through mathematical analysis. Consequently, we show that the performance of epidemic broadcasting improves significantly by introducing a small number of cut-through links and placing base stations of cut-through links appropriately according to the positional distribution of mobile nodes.