WSN10-5: Adaptive Multi-Copy Routing for Intermittently Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks (ICMANs) are mobile networks in which complete source-to- destination paths do not exist most of the time because of their sparse topology. Such networks enable communications among sparsely distributed moving objects, e.g. a network of ambulances. Traditional routing schemes are unsuitable in ICMANs because they only forward packets in connected paths. Recently, store-and-forward based routing (e.g. multi-copy relaying) have been proposed to address this. However, existing multi-copy strategies do not adapt to the frequent variations in network conditions as they rely heavily on the source to control the relaying process. In this paper, we propose an efficient store-and- forward based scheme, adaptive multi-copy routing (AMR), for packet delivery in ICMANs. In this scheme, instead of relying on the source, each relay node independently decides whether to forward a packet according to the delivery delay target and current network conditions. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme always adapts to the varying network mobility and/or delivery probability that cannot be anticipated in the conventional source-defined strategies and delivers packets within specific delay targets with minimum traffic overhead.