Impact of Duty Cycling on Opportunistic Communication

A major challenge in mobile wireless devices for opportunistic networks is to decrease the energy consumption. The decrease should not come at a cost of reduced application throughput (i.e., goodput). This work evaluates the potential performance gains for mobile nodes that adopt duty cycling in an opportunistic context. The paper presents an analytical framework for evaluating goodput and energy consumption of nodes based on a probabilistic estimation of effective contact durations, and it validates this framework on a mobility scenario. The study shows that both goodput and energy consumption depend strongly on the distribution of listening durations, and that goodput is independent of the contact rate among nodes. This work also includes extensive trace-driven simulations and demonstrates that duty cycling considerably improves the performance of opportunistic networks by decreasing the energy consumption without significantly affecting the goodput.