Estimation based erasure-coding routing in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Wireless Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are intermittently connected mobile wireless networks. Some well-known assumptions of traditional networks are no longer true in DTNs, which makes routing in DTNs a challenging problem. We observe that mobile nodes in realistic wireless DTNs may always have some mobility pattern information which can be used to estimate one node's ability to deliver a specific message. This estimation can greatly enhance the routing performance in DTNs. Furthermore, we adopt an alternative way to generate redundancy using erasure coding. With a fixed overhead, the erasure coding can generate a large number of message-blocks instead of a few replications, and therefore it allows the transmission of only a portion of message to a relay. This can greatly increase the routing diversity when combined with estimation-based approaches. We have conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our scheme. The results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms previously proposed schemes.