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Data Delivery Properties of Human Contact Networks

<06>Delay-tolerant networks attempt to connect nodes by opportunistically routing over

local contacts between intermediate nodes. This paper asks a fundamental question: Are human

contacts suited for creating paths between arbitrary source-destination pairs? Using two different

real-world traces, this paper shows that paths formed over human contacts are fragile, requiring rare

contacts, but if multiple paths are simultaneously explored, delivery time can become surprisingly

resilient to individual path failures. This has strong design implications for such networks. IEEE Trans.

Mobile Computing highlighted this as a “Spotlight” paper. An abbreviated version appeared in IEEE

INFOCOM and as an invited book chapter (Springer-Verlag).