A Novel Buffer Management Architecture for Epidemic Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs)

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless networks in which an end-to-end path for a given node pair can never exist for an extended period. It has been reported as a viable approach in launching multiple message replicas in order to increase message delivery ratio and reduce message delivery delay. This advantage, nonetheless, is at the expense of taking more buffer space at each node. The combination of custody and replication entails high buffer and bandwidth overhead. This paper investigates a new buffer management architecture for epidemic routing in DTNs, which helps each node to make a decision on which message should be forwarded or dropped. The proposed buffer management architecture is characterized by a suite of novel functional modules, including Summary Vector Exchange Module (SVEM), Networks State Estimation Module (NSEM), and Utility Calculation Module (UCM). Extensive simulation results show that the proposed buffer management architecture can achieve superb performance against its counterparts in terms of delivery ratio and delivery delay.