Energy-Efficient Routing in Delay-Tolerant Networks

Abstract

The lifetime of a wireless network is significantly affected by the energy consumed on data transmission. One approach which allows reduction of the transmission energy consumption is the new networking paradigm - the Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The topology of DTNs consists of nodes with short transmission range, thus allowing the reduction of energy consumption. However, this short transmission range leads to sparse network topologies, raising the challenge of an efficient routing protocol. Epidemic Routing Protocol (ERP), in which data packets are replicated on nodes that come in contact, is one of such DTN routing protocols. The basic ERP exhibits the shortest delay in packet delivery, but this short delay comes at the expense of large energy consumption. In our past publications, we have proposed a number of new variants of ERP for DTN - the Restricted Epidemic Routing (RER) protocols - which allow to efficiently tradeoff between the energy consumption of a single packet and the packet delivery delay. In this chapter, we extend our study to determine and to compare the overall lifetime of a network when the various RER protocols are used.