Dynamic Message Ferry Route (dMFR) for Partitioned MANETs

Abstract

Message Ferrying (MF) is a recently proposed scheme to restore a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) from partitioning. Despite of the effectiveness in partition restoration, it sometimes suffers from long delay caused by the poor design of ferry route. The Message Ferry Route (MFR) problem has earlier been studied to minimize this drawback of MF schemes. In this paper, we argue that a dynamic way of determining the ferry route would be more practical and effective for this problem. We thus define the dynamic MFR (dMFR) with more general and realistic assumptions than MFR. We propose a new routing scheme for dynamic message ferrying. The proposed scheme adopts the Shortest Process Time First (SPTF) rule for the Job Scheduling Problem (JSP), to construct ferry routes and is referred to as DyFeRo. From simulations, we show that DyFeRo can further shorten the average message delay from the existing schemes. With its simplicity and distributed nature, DyFeRo is a suitable solution for MANET partition restoration.