Optimal Message Transmission in Opportunistic Communications Based Internet of Things

In order to provide communication service in the opportunistic communication based Internet of Things (IOT) where there is only intermittent connectivity between things, a variety of epidemic-style routing algorithms have been proposed to achieve high message delivery probability at the cost of energy consumption. In this contribution, we investigate the problem of optimal multi-frame message transmission for opportunistic communication based IOT. By formulating the optimization problem with a Markov model, we derive the optimal policies under the multi-message transmission condition. We also investigate the performance of the proposed optimal policies through extensive numerical results, and conclude that the optimal policies give the best performance, which demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed optimal schemes.