Selective Message Forwarding in Delay Tolerant Networks

  • Authors:
  • Lei Tang;Qunwei Zheng;Jun Liu;Xiaoyan Hong

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, USA 77005;Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA 35487;Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA 35487;Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA 35487

  • Venue:
  • Mobile Networks and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

It is challenging to deliver messages in a network where no instant end-to-end path exists, so called delay-tolerant network (DTN). Node encounters are used for message forwarding. In this paper, we propose a DTN routing protocol SMART. SMART utilizes the travel companions of the destinations (i.e. nodes that frequently meet the destination) to increase the delivery opportunities while limiting message overhead to a bounded number. Our approach differs from related work in that it does not propagate node encounter history nor the delivery probabilities derived from the encounter history. In SMART, a message source injects a fixed number of message copies into the network to forward the message to a companion of the destination, which only forwards the message to a fixed number of the destination's companions. Our analysis and simulation results show that SMART has a higher delivery ratio and a smaller delivery latency than the schemes that only use controlled opportunistically-forwarding mechanism and has a significantly smaller routing overhead than a pure flooding scheme.