Performance analysis of hop‐limited epidemic routing in DTN with limited forwarding times

Abstract

SummaryBecause of the uncertainty of transmission opportunity in delay tolerant networks (DTN), routing algorithms in DTN often need nodes to serve as relays for others to carry and forward messages. One classic policy is the Epidemic routing (ER) algorithm. To reduce the overhead, the hop‐limited ER protocol is proposed. This method can get better performance through controlling the message hop count. However, because of the energy constraint or other factors, each node may forward only limited times, that is, both the message hop count and the forwarding times may be limited. This paper proposes a unifying framework to evaluate the performance of ER with the aforementioned constraints. Simulations based on both synthetic and real motion traces show the accuracy of the framework. In addition, we explore the impact of many parameters (e.g., message hop count) through extensive numerical results. For example, numerical results show that both the message hop count and the forwarding times can have certain impact on the routing performance, but their impact is related with many other factors (e.g., the number of nodes). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.