Self Adaptive Contention Aware Routing Protocol for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

Abstract:

            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 devices in miniature 

such as smart phones of heterogeneous capacities in terms of energy resources 

and buffer spaces. SAURP is characterized by the ability of identifying potential 

opportunities for forwarding messages to their destinations via a novel utility 

function based mechanism, in which a suite of environment parameters, such 

as wireless channel condition, nodal buffer occupancy, and encounter statistics, 

are jointly considered. Thus, SAURP can reroute messages around nodes 

experiencing high buffer occupancy, wireless interference, and/or congestion, 

while taking a considerably small number of transmissions. The developed 

utility function in SAURP is proved to be able to achieve optimal performance, 

which is further analyzed via a stochastic modeling approach. Extensive 

simulations are conducted to verify the developed analytical model and 

compare the proposed SAURP with a number of recently reported encounter-

based routing approaches in terms of delivery ratio, delivery delay, and the 

number of transmissions required for each message delivery. The simulation 

results show that SAURP outperforms all the counterpart multi-copy encounter-

based routing protocols considered in the study.