Exploiting DTN Routing Algorithms Under Resource Constraints

Abstract

Delay/disruption tolerant network (DTN) is originated from the pioneer research into interplanetary internet and later, researchers found that DTN can also be applied to many challenged networks. Several DTN routing protocols have been presented to improve the routing performance, since message delivery is difficult in such networks due to the absence of stable end-to-end paths. However, the protocols ignore the fact that the nodes in DTN like satellites and other wireless devices usually have very limited resources like battery, bandwidth, and storage. In this paper, we introduce four existing routing algorithms and two new routing algorithms we propose, and compare their performances of delivery ratio and latency in the case of limited buffer size under both ground and space environment. We obtain the curves of the network throughput varying with the network load, and find it showing a congestion phenomenon, from which we can compare the congestion control capacities of the routing protocols. Simulation results show that our newly proposed routing protocols can successfully cope with the congestion caused by storage constraints.