On using contact expectation for routing in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Conventional routing algorithms rely on the existence of persistent end-to-end paths for the delivery of a message to its destination via a predesigned path. However, in a delay tolerant network (DTN), nodes are intermittently connected, and thus the network topology is dynamic in nature, which makes the routing become one of the most challenging problems. A promising solution is to predict the nodes’ future contacts based on their contact histories. In this paper, we first propose an expected encounter based routing protocol (EER) which distributes multiple replicas of a message proportionally between two encounters according to their expected encounter values. In case of single replica of a message, EER makes the routing decision by comparing the minimum expected meeting delay to the destination. We further propose a community based routing protocol (CR) which takes advantages of the high contact frequency property of the community. The simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed routing protocols under different network parameters.