A study to understand the impact of node density on data dissemination time in opportunistic networks

In this paper, we study the impact of node density on data dissemination time and achieved data quality in a distributed people-centric system. Our results are obtained through an extensive simulation campaign employing Random Way Point and Random Direction mobility and realistic node densities of real environments. Our simulation results show that, the impact of node density does not significantly affect the data dissemination time after a certain threshold of node density, without compromising the achieved data quality. This result is evident for both mobility models. Our study provides an insight to the parameters we need to consider while evaluating the success of any distributed people-centric system.