Decentralized Stochastic Control of Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

We study in this paper optimal stochastic control issues in delay tolerant networks. We first derive the structure of optimal 2-hop forwarding policies. In order to be implemented, such policies require the knowledge of some system parameters such as the number of mobiles or the rate of contacts between mobiles, but these could be unknown at system design time or may change over time. To address this problem, we design adaptive policies combining estimation and control that achieve optimal performance in spite of the lack of information. We then study interactions that may occur in the presence of several competing classes of mobiles and formulate this as a cost-coupled stochastic game. We show that this game has a unique Nash equilibrium such that each class adopts the optimal forwarding policy determined for the single class problem.