Energy-efficient Joint Control of Epidemic Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Due to the uncertain of connections in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), most routing algorithms in DTNs need nodes to forward the message to others based on the opportunistic contact. The contact is related with the beaconing rate. In particular, nodes have more chances to encounter with each other with bigger beaconing rate, but more energy will be used. On the other hand, if the nodes forward the message to every node all the time, the efficiency of the routing algorithm is better, but it needs more energy, too. This paper tries to exploit the optimal beaconing rate and forwarding rate when the total energy is constraint. First, a theoretical framework is proposed, which can be used to evaluate the performance with different forwarding rate and beaconing rate. Then, this paper formulates a joint optimization problem based on the framework. Through Pontryagin’s Maximal Principle, this paper obtains the optimal policy and proves that both the optimal forwarding and beaconing rates conform to threshold form. Simulation results show the accuracy of the theoretical framework. Extensive numerical results show that the optimal policy obtained in this paper is the best.