DTN support for news dissemination in an urban area

We are studying the practicality of news dissemination over a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) in an urban area. The target application is the distribution of the electronic version of a newspaper in a large city. Therefore, although strict time constraints do not apply, spreading the information should be achieved within a reasonable delay. We consider that mobile users subscribe to their content of interest and expect to receive it within their journey from their home to their office. We provide two contributions. Firstly, we consider a simple DTN environment when content is distributed solely through inter-contact of mobile nodes. We derive analytical expressions for the packet delay in such environments and suggest how to improve effectively the expected message delay in the case of an area with low or high density of mobile nodes. Secondly, if the delay is found to be excessive, we suggest the deployment of some data kiosks in the environment to better support the dissemination of content. Data kiosks are simple devices that receive content directly from the source, usually using wired or cellular networks. We investigate both an upper bound and a lower bound of the number of data kiosks to distribute the content over a geographical area within an expected delay objective. We also show the important property that those bounds scale linearly with the contact rates between a mobile node and a data kiosk. The analytical results are validated through simulation using a number of mobility models.