Cooperative On-the-Fly Decision Making in Mobility-Controlled Multi Ferry Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a cooperative On-the-fly Decision maker for Multi Ferry (ODMF) delay tolerant networks. ODMF chooses the next node to visit for mobility-controlled data ferries. In ODMF, each ferry keeps a history about its last visit time to nodes and applies it in its decision making. Moreover, a ferry shares and exchanges the history information with other ferries through an indirect signaling. While there is no direct communication among ferries in our assumptions, ferries employ nodes as relays for the indirect signaling of control information. The simulation results show that ODMF outperforms the TSP and on-the-fly approaches in terms of message latency. In scenarios with high number of ferries, it can be seen that the impact of indirect signaling on the performance is more notable. In ODMF, the travel time is reduced for messages that are in the buffer of ferries by the cooperative decision making of ferries. In addition, we study and discuss the impact of increasing number of ferries and increasing ferry speed on the performance and cost of a message ferry network. We show that a required performance can be achieved with less cost by increasing speed of ferries than increasing number of ferries.