Contention Aware Routing for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

This paper introduces a novel multi-copy routing protocol, called Self Adaptive Utility-based Routing Protocol (SAURP), for Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) that are possibly composed of a vast number of miniature devices such as smart phones, hand-held devices, and sensors mounted in fixed or mobile objects. SAURP aims to explore the possibility of taking mobile nodes as message carriers in order for end-to-end delivery of the messages. The best carrier for a message is determined by the prediction result using a novel contact model, where the network status, including wireless link condition and nodal buffer availability, are jointly considered. The paper argues and proves that the nodal movement and the predicted collocation with the message recipient can serve as meaningful information to achieve an intelligent message forwarding decision at each node. The proposed protocol has been implemented and compared with a number of existing encounter-based routing approaches in terms of delivery delay, and the number of transmissions required for message delivery. The simulation results show that the proposed SAURP outperforms all the counterpart multi-copy encounter-based routing protocols considered in the study.