Controlled Epidemic Routing for Multicasting in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a class of networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions due to sparse distribution of nodes. DTN multicasting is a desirable feature for applications where some form of group communication is needed. In this paper, we examine multicasting in DTNs using controlled flooding schemes. Specifically, we analyze basic multicast routing schemes for fundamental performance metrics such as message delivery ratio, message delay, and buffer occupancy. Further, we study the effects of different controlled Epidemic routing schemes using TTL and message expiration times. Our experiments show that our analytical results are accurate and that with careful protocol parameter selection it is possible to achieve high delivery rates for various system scenarios.