Abstract
An intermittently connected network (ICN) is defined as a mobile network that uses cooperation between nodes to facilitate communication when a connected path between the source and destination does not exist. This cooperation consists of nodes carrying messages from other nodes to help deliver them to their destinations. An ICN does not require an infrastructure and routing information is not retained by the nodes. While this may be a useful environment for message dissemination, there are challenges in routing messages. In particular, providing satisfactory delivery performance while maintaining a low overhead ratio is difficult without routing information or a network infrastructure. In this paper, erasure coding is employed to improve the delivery rate in an ICN. The message delivery probability is derived and used to evaluate the performance. It is shown that the use of erasure coding can significantly improve the message delivery rate.