Reasonable routing in delay/disruption tolerant networks

Abstract

Delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) is an approach to networking where intermittent connectivity exists: it is often afforded by a store and forward technique. Depending on the capability of intermediary nodes to carry and forward messages, messages can be eventually delivered to their destination by mobile nodes with an appropriate routing protocol. To have achieved a successful delivery, most DTN routing protocols use message duplication methods. Although messages are rapidly transferred to the destination, the redundancy in the number of message copies increases rapidly. This paper presents a new routing scheme based on a stochastic process for epidemic routing. Message redundancy is efficiently reduced and the number of message copies is controlled reasonably. During the contact process of nodes in the network, the number of message copies changes, and according to the variability in the number of copies, we construct a special Markov chain, birth and death process, on the number of message copies then calculate and obtain a stationary distribution of the birth and death process. Comparing the theoretical model with the simulation we have performed we see similar results. Our method improves on time-to-live (TTL) and antipacket methods, in both redundancy and delivery success efficiency.