  Prior work on routing in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) has commonly made the
assumption that each pair of nodes shares the same inter-contact time
distribution as every other pair. The main argument in this paper is that
researchers should also be looking at heterogeneous inter-contact time
distributions. We demonstrate the presence of such heterogeneity in the
often-used Dartmouth Wi-Fi data set. We also show that DTN routing can benefit
from knowing these distributions. We first introduce a new stochastic model
focusing on the inter-contact time distributions between all pairs of nodes,
which we validate on real connectivity patterns. We then analytically derive
the mean delivery time for a bundle of information traversing the network for
simple single copy routing schemes. The purpose is to examine the theoretic
impact of heterogeneous inter-contact time distributions. Finally, we show that
we can exploit this user diversity to improve routing performance.
