Probabilistic routing protocol with firefly particle swarm optimisation for delay tolerant networks enhanced with chaos theory

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a proactive routing paradigm for delay tolerant networks (DTN) using probabilistic routing implemented via firefly particle swarm optimisation and optimised by chaos maps. DTN is a specific class of networks where there is absence of an end to end connectivity among nodes and are characterised by long or variable delays, asymmetric data rates and high error rates. The routing scheme considers the constrained environment of DTN nodes and implements a meta-heuristic paradigm to facilitate data transfer. The chaos maps further enhance the probabilistic routing parameters controlling brightness and ageing by randomising them. The protocol is implemented on ONE simulator and its performance is compared with traditional DTN routing schemes across delivery probability, average latency, overhead ratio and buffer utilisation. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol performs better than its contemporary ant PRoPHET protocol across the various performance metrics.