A study of token traversal strategies on tree-based backbones for mobile ad hoc - delay tolerant networks

Tree-based backbone establishment and maintenance in mobile ad hoc - delay tolerant networks is often operated through the use of traversing tokens. A study and framework are proposed here for various token traversal strategies on tree-based backbones. The proposed strategies execute in a distributed and purely decentralized manner, and require only 1-hop knowledge. Aiming at providing the highest robustness and quality of services, these token-traversal strategies are studied in particular with an algorithm for merging and maintaining the different trees based on the quality of the nodes. For the robustness aspect, the use of a trust-based evaluation framework is assumed and the weights of the different nodes are based on their quality of cooperation. Three cost functions are implemented in order to evaluate the trust based framework proposed, including another function for evaluating tree-convergence time. Results and comparison charts are provided to illustrate the trade-off between the various strategies in terms of performance, cost (memory and communication) and robustness.