Multi-hop routing under short contact in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

As technologies evolve, mobile devices are capable of storing, communicating, and disseminating large data files across the network. Communicating large data is particularly challenging in Delay Tolerant Networks because of lack of connectivity and short contacts among network nodes. To simplify the routing, existing works often ignore the data size and duration of a contact. That is, once transmitted, the data always successfully arrives at the receiver. Thus, these protocols are not suitable in the data-intensive mobile era. In this work, we propose a large data routing (LDR) protocol that chops large data into chunks and performs forwarding at the chunk level over multiple successive contacts. We also build a probabilistic model integrating the inter-contact time, contact frequency, and contact duration. The model is used to compute the edge weights in a contact graph and multi-hop delivery probabilities among network nodes. Simulations using real-world mobility traces show that our scheme can achieve up to 53% higher delivery rate compared to other routing strategies.