Cross-Layer Resource Allocation for Efcient Message Dissemination in Rural Infostation Systems

Hao Liang and Weihua Zhuang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1

AbstractIn this paper, we consider a rural infostation system where power and bandwidth limited infostations are deployed in a large network area with sparsely populated mobile nodes. Direct transmission services are provided to each mobile node, whereas message dissemination services facilitated by relaying are provided to a subgroup of mobile nodes. We investigate radio resource allocation at infostations, and propose a cross-layer resource allocation scheme with tuneable resource allocation parameters at the network layer and link layer. Analytical models are established to characterize the dependence of system performance on the various parameters of the proposed scheme, and the accuracy is veried by simulations. A cross-layer design example is presented to demonstrate that, by tuning resource allocation parameters at the protocol layers, the performance of direct transmission services can be guaranteed for relay nodes, and the quality of message dissemination services can be improved.

I. I NTRODUCTION Nowadays, as the demands for broadband wireless access increase, wireless infrastructures are widely deployed to provide communication opportunities for mobile nodes. However, in remote or developing regions such as rural areas, although there are many wireless application opportunities, the deployment of wireless infrastructures is still lacking because of the inherent high cost [1]. Conventional rural communication technologies supported by dialup lines and satellites suffer from the problems of low access speed and high capital expenditure [2]. One possible solution to these problems is the rural area delay tolerant network (DTN), where buses and cars are used to ferry data to and from kiosks for providing wireless services to subscribers [2]. However, these message ferries need to be specially designed and an extra service delay is introduced by their physical movements. More recently, with the development of wireless mesh networking technology, the concept of rural infostation system is introduced [1]. In a rural infostation system, no specially designed message ferry is needed. Solar cell or eolic generator powered infostations are deployed and connected to a wireless mesh backbone. Internet or remote server access can be provided to mobile nodes when they walk/drive through the transmission range of infostations. Two types of services can be provided by a rural infostation system: Direct transmission services (e.g., email and ftp) include uplink and downlink trafc, and are provided to all mobile nodes by direct transmissions when they come into the transmission range of an infostation; Message dissemination services (e.g., citizen journalism and commercial advertising) are generated periodically by servers in the Internet, and are destined to a subgroup of mobile nodes [3] [4]. In order to keep

timeliness for the disseminated messages, store-carry-forward DTN routing can be incorporated in infostation systems [5], where a subgroup of non-destination relay nodes provide relay capabilities. Disseminated messages can be stored and carried by relay nodes for a considerably long period of time, and then delivered to the destination nodes when communication opportunities arise. However, in the context of a rural infostation system where no specially designed message ferry exists, the relay capabilities can only be provided by mobile nodes which have their own performance requirements on direct transmission services. Since the transmission range and communication bandwidth provided by infostations are limited by their scarce power supply [1], an effective and efcient radio resource allocation for relay nodes is indispensable. On the other hand, some existing works on DTN routing algorithms [6], such as the spray routing [7], can improve the performance of message dissemination under bandwidth limitation. But these works are proposed for a DTN with a single service, where resource allocation for the direct transmission services to relay nodes is not considered. How to improve the efciency of message dissemination service while guaranteeing the performance of the direct transmission services is still an open issue. In this work, we propose a cross-layer resource allocation scheme with tuneable network layer and link layer resource allocation parameters to achieve efcient message dissemination. Analytical models are presented to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme. The analytical results are validated by simulations. A cross-layer design example is further presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efciency of our proposed scheme. II. S YSTEM M ODEL Consider a rural infostation system as shown in Fig. 1. Sparsely populated mobile nodes randomly move within a large rural network area. There are MS power and bandwidth limited infostations deployed and connected to a wireless mesh backbone (through high gain directional antennas) to provide Internet access. All the mobile nodes are equipped with a short-range radio transceiver with an omnidirectional antenna to communicate with each other. The same short-range radio transceiver and omnidirectional antenna are also adopted by each infostation to provide last-hop access for mobile nodes [8]. The mobile nodes are considered as normal pedestrians who can stay disconnected for hours and travel through the transmission range of an infostation within several minutes.

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III. T HE P ROPOSED C ROSS -L AYER R ESOURCE A LLOCATION S CHEME The proposed scheme is performed by infostations for radio resource allocation to mobile nodes. It is based on a cross-layer design at both network layer and link layer. At the network layer, a probabilistic relaying mechanism is adopted to control the number of relay nodes for message carrying; At the link layer, a frame structure with dynamic reservations is implemented to allocate radio resources among direct transmission services and message dissemination services. Fig. 1: An illustration of rural infostation system. A. Probabilistic Relaying at Network Layer The infostation system operates in one of two modes, i.e., relay mode and non-relay mode. When a new message dissemination session begins, the relay mode starts and encoded messages are transmitted to relay nodes when they are in the transmission range of an infostation. After each visit of a relay node, the relay mode is terminated with probability p. When the relay mode is terminated, the infostation system enters the non-relay mode, and encoded messages are not transmitted to relay nodes anymore. But the disseminated messages can still be delivered by relay nodes when they encounter the destination nodes, or by direct transmissions when destination nodes come into the transmission range of an infostation. The infostation system will re-enter the relay mode when a new message dissemination session begins. On condition that a new session begins and the current operation mode is still relay mode, the infostation system will start disseminating encoded messages for the new session without an operation mode change. In the case p = 0, the infostation system will always operate under the relay mode. B. Dynamic Reservation at Link Layer When a mobile node comes into the transmission range of an infostation, after a neighbor discovery procedure [1], the infostation noties the mobile node about the reservation parameters by a NOTIFICATION message. Then data transmissions begin and follow a frame structure. Time is partitioned into equal intervals with duration T and each interval is referred to as a frame. At the beginning of each frame, there is a beacon period with duration TB for synchronization. Following the beacon period are NF slots for packet transmission. The slot duration TS equals the time for the transmission of a link layer packet. Since in the DTN framework trafc is represented in self-contained messages (or bundles as dened in [10]), for direct transmission services and message dissemination services, each message is partitioned into K link layer packets before transmissions. Different reservation parameters are adopted for the relay mode and non-relay mode. We rst consider the resource allocation for a single mobile node. Under the relay mode, for timely message delivery of dissemination service, when a relay node is in the transmission range of an infostation, the rst NR K slots are reserved for the infostation to transmit NR (1 NR KM ) encoded messages to the relay node. Note that because of node mobility, it is possible for a relay node to

We assume that all mobile nodes have the same priority on wireless channel access and the wireless transmissions are error free. Uplink and downlink direct transmission services are provided to each mobile node when it is in the transmission range of an infostation. A message dissemination service is considered where dissemination sessions are periodically generated by a server in the Internet and destined to a subgroup of MD destination nodes. Each session is composed of KM messages. Upon the generation of a new session, the infostation system stops serving the obsolete session and all obsolete messages are deleted. The same operation is performed by a mobile node when it receives the messages in a new session. When a destination node is in the transmission range of an infostation, the message dissemination service is served with higher priority than direct transmission services to achieve timely delivery. For further improvement of message dissemination performance, another subgroup of MR relay nodes can provide store-carry-forward routing capabilities. We consider a scenario where all relay nodes have the same average trafc loads and performance requirements on direct transmission services, and each relay node provides a buffer space of BR messages for message dissemination service, where 0 < BR KM . Both conventional or network coding based store-carryforward routing can be implemented for message dissemination. We adopt the network coding based method in this work since it is recently proved to be efcient when the capabilities (e.g. buffer spaces) of relay nodes are limited [9]. The encoding mechanism can be briey described as follows. When a relay node meets a destination node (or a relay/destination node is in the transmission range of an infostation), an encoded message is sent by the relay node (or the infostation) based on a random linear combination of all messages in its buffer. After the reception of the encoded message, the relay or destination node stores it in the buffer if space is available. Otherwise, the relay or destination node performs a random linear combination of each message in the buffer with the received message and stores the result accordingly. If a node keeps r independently encoded messages, we say that the rank of this node is r. The destination node can decode all disseminated messages if it reaches rank KM .

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move out of the range of an infostation without nishing the reception of NR encoded messages. After the transmission, if the relay node still stays in the transmission range of the infostation, U and D fractions of slots within each frame are assigned for uplink and downlink direct transmission services, respectively, where U + D = 1. Under the non-relay mode, there is no slot reserved for the transmission of encoded messages. There are U and D fractions of slots within each frame allocated for uplink and downlink direct transmission services as long as the relay node stays in the transmission range of the infostation. The values of U and D should be chosen based on the performance tradeoff between uplink and downlink direct transmission services for a relay node. Note that a destination node can choose a different set of values for U and D based on its preference, but the discussion is beyond the scope of this paper since we focus on the performance guarantee of direct transmission services for relay nodes in this work. Within each frame, when the uplink or downlink queue of a direct transmission service is drained, the unutilized slots can be scheduled by the infostation for the other non-empty queue to reduce the overhead. If the uplink queue of a mobile node is drained, an EMPTY message should be transmitted by this node to notify the infostation. If there are more than one mobile node in the transmission range of an infostation, the slots within each frame are equally shared by these nodes to achieve the same channel access priority. In the case that both queues of uplink and downlink direct transmission services are drained for a mobile node, the infostation equally assigns the unutilized slots to other nodes with non-empty queues to reduce the overhead. C. Cross-Layer Design There are two sets of design parameters in our proposed cross-layer resource allocation scheme, i.e., the network layer parameter p and the link layer parameters NR and U (or D ). These parameters should be chosen coherently based on two criteria: 1) The performance requirements on direct transmission services of relay nodes should be guaranteed; 2) If there exist multiple feasible solutions for parameters (p, NR , U ), the nal choice depends on possible performance enhancement for the message dissemination service. For a rural infostation system where a network connection is rare, we consider the message delivery probability under a limited buffer space as the performance measure to be guaranteed for direct transmission services of relay nodes (denoted by PU and PD for uplink and downlink, respectively). On the other hand, since timely delivery is most important for the message dissemination service, we consider the average delivery probability over all message dissemination sessions as its performance metric (denoted by PM ) [4]. Obviously, PU , PD , and PM are functions of design parameters (p, NR , U ). Based on the cross-layer design criteria, the optimal values of (p, NR , U ) is given by the following optimization problem
op op , U ) = arg (pop , NR

where = [0, 1], = [1, KM ], PU O and PDO are the required guaranteed delivery probabilities of uplink and downlink direct transmission services, respectively. IV. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme and to solve the parameter optimization problem (1), analytical models are established in this section. For analytical simplicity, the following assumptions are made: 1) The movement of all mobile nodes follows the random direction (RD) mobility model [11] with the same parameters, and the density of mobile nodes is low; 2) Message arrivals of uplink and downlink direct transmission services and session arrivals of message dissemination service are independent and follow a Poisson process. The number of packets included in each message (K ) is a constant. For RD mobility, dene the inter-visiting time as the time between two consecutive visits of a mobile node to an infostation and the inter-meeting time as the time between two consecutive meetings of two mobile nodes. We further dene the sojourn duration as the period that a mobile node stays within the transmission range of an infostation, and the contact duration as the period that two mobile nodes stay within the transmission range of each other. Based on assumption 1), the inter-visiting time and inter-meeting time are approximately exponentially distributed with rate V and M , respectively [11]. Although the probability density functions (PDFs) of the sojourn duration and contact duration are not obtainable, their expectations TSJ and TCT can be derived in closed-form expressions, where the sojourn duration can be viewed as a special case of the contact duration with a stationary mobile node (i.e., the infostation). The probability that there are two or more mobile nodes and/or infostations simultaneously within the transmission range of each other is negligible [11]. In the following analysis, we omit the time spent on neighbor discovery and notication of reservation parameters. An extension to include the time can be made based on the PDF of neighbor discovery time [1]. A. Guaranteed Performance of Direct Transmission Services As discussed in Subsection III-C, we focus on the analysis of guaranteed message delivery probability when only U and D fractions of slots in each frame are occupied by uplink and downlink direct transmission services, respectively. Consider a specic relay node as the tagged node and, without loss of generality, we investigate the uplink direct transmission service. Let U denote the uplink message arrival rate at the tagged node, and BU the buffer space for uplink direct transmission service. Since the inter-visiting time is exponentially distributed and is much larger than the sojourn duration when the density of mobile nodes and infostations is low, the queueing behavior of uplink direct transmission service can be described by a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC). Dene the system states as (XU (t), O(t)), where XU (t) [0, BU ] denotes the number of messages need to be uploaded in the

subject to PU PU O , PD PDO

p,NR ,U

max

PM (1)

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uplink queue of the tagged node and O(t) {R, Q} is the operation mode of the infostation system. States R and Q represent relay mode and non-relay mode, respectively. Denote the transition rate from state (i, j ) to state (m, n) of the uplink U queue as q( i,j ),(m,n) . With an uplink message arrival rate U , we have
U q( i,j ),(i+1,j ) = U , 0 i BU 1, j {R, Q}.

be calculated by solving the system of balance equations [12]. The guaranteed message delivery probability of uplink direct U U B . transmission service is PU = 1 B U ,R U ,Q B. Performance of Message Dissemination Service Under a low density of mobile nodes and infostations, an ordinary differentiation functions (ODEs) model can be established for the performance analysis of store-carry-forward routing [9] [13]. We extend the model by considering resource allocation at both network layer and link layer. For the network coding based store-carry-forward routing, we make a similar assumption as in [9] that encoded messages are linearly independent with a high probability. For a single message dissemination session, dene the system states as (Y1 (t), , YBR (t), Z1 (t), , ZKM (t), V (t)), where Yi (t) [0, MR ] denotes the number of relay nodes whose rank equals i, Zj (t) [0, MD ] represents the number of destination nodes whose rank is j , V (t) 0 is the number of times that the infostations are visited by relay nodes since the initiation of the message dissemination session. Then the ODEs for our proposed crosslayer resource allocation scheme are given by dYi (t) dt dZj (t) dt = = RIV Y (i, t) ROV Y (i, t), 1 i BR RIV Z (j, t) + RIM Z (j, t) ROV Z (j, t) ROM Z (j, t), 1 j KM

(2)

If the tagged node visits an infostation with an empty buffer, state transition only happens for O(t) if the operation mode changes. Similar state transition on O(t) happens if an infostation is visited by a relay node other than the tagged one and also the operation mode changes. Thus we have
U q(0 ,R),(0,Q) = pMR MS V U q( i,R),(i,Q)

(3) (4)

p(MR 1)MS V , 1 i BU .

When the tagged node visits one of the infostations with a non-empty buffer, messages can be uploaded. But the volume of messages that can be uploaded depends on the operation mode of the infostation system. The transition rates are given by
U q( i,R),(max(0,iSU R ),R)

= (1 p)MS V , 1 i BU = pMS V , 1 i BU

(5) (6) (7)

U q( i,R),(max(0,iSU R ),Q)

U q( i,Q),(max(0,iSU Q ),Q) = MS V , 1 i BU

where SU R and SU Q are the numbers of messages that can be uploaded during the sojourn duration under the relay mode and non-relay mode, respectively, and are given by SU R = max round TSJ T TSJ T NF NR K, 0 NF U . K U K (8)

dV (t) = MR MS V (12) dt where RIV Y (i, t) and ROV Y (i, t) are the rate of transitions into and out of state Yi (t) caused by a visit of a relay node to an infostation. We have RIV Y (i, t) MS V PR (t) = MS V PR (t)
i1 j =0

SU Q = round

(9)

Yj (t)I (SSJR , (i j )), if 1 i BR 1 BR 1 Y ( t ) C (SSJR , (BR j )), j j =0 otherwise

(13)

Note that we neglect possible fractional frame in the calculation since the duration of a frame is much shorter than the sojourn duration. In the case SU R = 0, (5) should be omitted, and (3)-(4) and (6) should be merged into one as
U q( i,R),(i,Q) = pMR MS V , 0 i BU .

(10)

MS V PR (t)Yi (t)C (SSJR , 1), ROV Y (i, t) = if 1 i BR 1 0, otherwise

B

(14)

New message dissemination sessions arrive with rate M , and operation mode is changed from the non-relay mode to the relay mode with the same rate. The related transition rate can be calculated as
U q( i,Q),(i,R) = M , 0 i BU .

(11)

For any other state transition not mentioned above, the transition rate is equal to 0. Obviously, the CTMC dened above is a nite state irreducible Markov chain and therefore is ergodic, and the stationary probability exists. Denote the stationary U , 0 i BU , j {R, Q} . It can probability as U = i,j

R Yj (t) is the number of relay nodes where Y0 (t) = MR j =1 with rank 0; PR (t) = (1 p)V (t) is the probability that the infostation system is operating under the relay mode at time t; SSJR = min(NR , round (TSJ /T ) NF /K ) denotes the actual number of encoded messages that can be transmitted when a relay node is in the transmission range of an infostation; I (i, j ) is an indication function which equals 1 if i is equal to j , and 0 otherwise; C (i, j ) is a comparison function which equals 1 if i is greater than or equal to j , and 0 otherwise. Note that RIV Z (j, t) and ROV Z (j, t) denote the rates of transitions into and out of state Zj (t) caused by a visit of a destination node to an infostation, RIM Z (j, t) and ROM Z (j, t)

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are the rates of transitions into and out of state Zj (t) caused by a meet between a destination node and a relay node. Their mathematical expressions can be derived in a way similar to RIV Y (i, t) and ROV Y (i, t) and are omitted here because of space limitation. The ODEs in (12) can be solved with an initial condition Yi (0) = 0 (1 i BR ), Zj (0) = 0 (1 j KM ), and V (0) = 0. Then the delivery probability of the message dissemination session at time t can be represented by PM (t) = ZKM (t)/MD . The average delivery probability over all mes sage dissemination sessions is PM = 0 PM (t)M eM t dt. V. N UMERICAL AND S IMULATION R ESULTS In this section, numerical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed crosslayer resource allocation scheme. We consider a sparse network with RD mobility parameters V = 2.9412 105 s1 , M = 3.7774 105 s1 , TSJ = 214.0842 s, TCT = 115.6929 s calculated from the method given in [11]. There are ve infostations with arbitrary deployment locations in the network region (MS = 5). The number of relay and destination nodes are given by MR = 25 and MD = 10, respectively. For the frame structure dened in Subsection III-B, without going through the details of physical layer issues in rural infostation systems, we choose the parameters TB = TS = 1 ms and NF = 200 slots. The session arrival rate of message dissemination service is M = 1 105 session/s. Each message dissemination session includes KM = 20 messages and each message consists of K = 2 104 packets. The size of the eld on which the network coding is operated is 256. The buffer space provided by a relay node for uplink direct transmission service is BU = 50 messages. A. Performance Evaluation Fig. 2 shows the guaranteed message delivery probability of uplink direct transmission service versus U . It can be observed that, as U increases, the guaranteed message delivery probability decreases because of a higher blocking probability in the uplink queue. The guaranteed message delivery probability increases as NR decreases and as U increases since more radio resources can be utilized by a relay node for uplink direct transmission service. The guaranteed message delivery probability can also be improved with a larger p since the relay mode is terminated more quickly, and a relay node can be better served under the non-relay mode for uplink direct transmission service. It can be seen that the analytical and simulation results match well with each other. The delivery probability of message dissemination service versus time is shown in Fig. 3. We can observe that the analytical results agree well with the simulation results. The delivery probability is slightly higher for analytical results because of the simplied assumption of linear independency in Subsection IV-B. At time 0, the delivery probability is 0 for all cases since no message has been transmitted. As time increases, the delivery probability increases accordingly and approaches 1 when time is sufciently large, because the

1 0.9

Guaranteed message delivery probability

0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 p=0.010, NR = 3, U = 0.3 (analysis) 0.2 0.1 0 p=0.003, N = 3, = 0.3 (analysis)
R R R U U U

p=0.003, N = 6, = 0.3 (analysis) p=0.003, N = 6, = 0.2 (analysis) Simulation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 x 10 10

4

U (message/s)

Fig. 2: Guaranteed message delivery probability of uplink direct transmission service versus U .
1 0.9 0.8 0.7 Delivery probability 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0 0.5 1 Time (s) p=0.005, NR=6, BR=6 (analysis) p=0.001, NR=4, BR=6 (analysis) p=0.001, NR=4, BR=2 (analysis) p=0.005, NR=6, BR=6 (simulation) p=0.001, NR=4, BR=6 (simulation) p=0.001, NR=4, BR=2 (simulation) 1.5 2 2.5 x 10
4

Fig. 3: Delivery probability of message dissemination service versus time. disseminated messages have been delivered to most destination nodes. The delivery probability can be improved with a larger relay buffer size BR since more encoded messages can be carried by relay nodes. The relation between delivery probability and p or NR is discussed in the following. B. A Cross-Layer Design Example As an example of cross-layer design, we consider the uplink and downlink direct transmission services are equivalent with U = 0.5, and focus on the relation between parameters p and NR . The message arrival rate for uplink direct transmission service is U = 6104 message/s. Fig. 4 shows the guaranteed message delivery probability of uplink direct transmission service versus p. For the system parameters under consideration, at most 10 messages can be exchanged during TSJ . The odd values for NR are not chosen because of their overhead on reservation when U = 0.5. For a certain requirement on guaranteed message delivery probability such as PU O = 0.8, there exist several sets of resource allocation parameters which can improve the performance of message dissemination service under different NR , i.e. (p = 0, NR = 2), (p = 0.0005, NR = 4), (p = 0.0025, NR = 6), (p = 0.0044, NR = 8), and (p = 0.0064, NR = 10). Note that for a given NR , p is

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1 0.9 Guaranteed message delivery probability 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0 0.002 0.004 0.006 p 0.008 0.01 N =2
R R

Normalized delivery probability

1 0.995 0.99 0.985 0.98 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 p=0, NR=2, BR=2 p=0.0005, N =4, B =2
R R

p=0.0025, NR=6, BR=2 p=0.0044, NR=8, BR=2 p=0.0064, N =10, B =2

R R

2.5

3.5 x 10
4

Time (s)

Normalized delivery probability

1 0.98 0.96 0.94 0.92 p=0.0025, NR=6, BR=6 p=0.0044, N =8, B =6

R R

N =4 NR = 6 NR = 8 NR = 10 0.012

p=0.0064, NR=10, BR=6 p=0.0005, N =4, B =6

R R

p=0, NR=2, BR=6 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 x 10

4

Time (s)

Fig. 4: Guaranteed message delivery probability of uplink direct transmission service versus p.

Fig. 5: Normalized delivery probability of message dissemination service versus time. Further work includes the generalization of our scheme to incorporate an error-prone wireless channel [1] and to accommodate more realistic community-based node mobility models [11]. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research was supported by a research grant from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. The authors wish to thank Mr. Ho Ting Cheng for his helpful suggestions which improved the quality of this paper. R EFERENCES
[1] L. Galluccio, A. Leonardi, G. Morabito, and S. Palazzo, Timely and energy-efcient communications in rural infostation systems, IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 4853, Jun. 2008. [2] A. Seth, D. Kroeker, M. Zaharia, S. Guo, and S. Keshav, Low-cost communication for rural Internet kiosks using mechanical backhaul, in Proc. ACM MOBICOM06, pp. 334345, Sept. 2006. [3] A. Kate, G. M. Zaverucha, and U. Hengartner, Anonymity and security in delay tolerant networks, in Proc. IEEE SecureComm07, pp. 504 513, Sept. 2007. [4] M. Demmer, DTNServ: A case for service classes in delay tolerant networks, in Proc. IEEE ICCP08, pp. 177184, Aug. 2008. [5] Z. J. Haas and T. Small, A new networking model for biological applications of ad hoc sensor networks, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 2740, Feb. 2006. [6] Z. Zhang, Routing in intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks and delay tolerant networks: overview and challenges, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 2437, 2006. [7] T. Spyropoulos, K. Psounis, and C. Raghavendra, Spray and wait: an efcient routing scheme for intermittently connected mobile networks, in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM WDTN05, pp. 252259, Aug. 2005. [8] P. Bhagwaty, B. Ramanz, and D. Sanghi, Turning 802.11 inside-out, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 3338, Jan. 2004. [9] Y. Lin, B. Li, and B. Liang, Stochastic analysis of network coding in epidemic routing, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 794808, Jun. 2008. [10] K. Fall, A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets, in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM03, pp. 2734, Aug. 2003. [11] T. Spyropoulos, A. Jindal, and K. Psounis, An analytical study of fundamental mobility properties for encounter-based protocols, International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems (IJAACS), vol. 1, no. 12, pp. 440, Jul. 2008. [12] L. Kleinrock, Queueing Systems, vol. 1. New York: Wiley, 1975. [13] X. Zhang, G. Neglia, J. Kurose, and D. Towsley, Performance modeling of epidemic routing, Elsevier Computer Networks, vol. 51, no. 10, pp. 28672891, Jul. 2007.

kept as small as possible since the relay mode tends to last longer for a smaller p and more relay nodes can become message carriers. These sets of parameters result in different performance of message dissemination service as shown in Fig. 5. For illustration clarity, these results are normalized by the delivery probability under parameter set (p = 0, NR = 2) for the case BR = 2 and (p = 0.0025, NR = 6) for the case BR = 6. We can see that, when BR = 2, the parameter set (p = 0, NR = 2) results in the best performance (with average delivery probability of 0.9131), because the buffer space is limited at relay nodes. On the other hand, when BR = 6, the parameter set (p = 0.0025, NR = 6) provides the highest delivery probability (with average value of 0.9385). The reason is that when the buffer space is sufciently large (BR > 4), more encoded messages can be transmitted to and carried by relay nodes when NR = 6. Although the relay mode lasts longer for NR = 2 and NR = 4, the delivery speed is constrained by the volume of messages carried by each relay node. Moreover, since BR < 8, there is a waste of radio resources for transmitting extra encoded messages to relay nodes during each visit when NR = 8 and NR = 10. As a result, for the cross-layer design issue discussed in Subsection III-C, under the requirements of 0.8 on guaranteed message delivery probability of uplink direct transmission services of relay op = 2) nodes, the optimal parameter sets are: (pop = 0, NR op op for BR = 2 and (p = 0.0025, NR = 6) for BR = 6. VI. C ONCLUSIONS AND F URTHER W ORK In this paper, a rural infostation system is considered, and a cross-layer resource allocation scheme is proposed for efcient message dissemination. By tuning the network layer resource allocation parameter p and the link layer resource allocation parameters NR and U , the performance requirements for direct transmission services of relay nodes can be guaranteed. The performance of message dissemination service can also be improved by properly choosing the resource allocation parameters. The effectiveness and efciency of the proposed scheme is evaluated by numerical results and validated by simulations.

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