Multihop-Delivery-Quality-Based Routing in DTNs

In delay-tolerant networks (DTNs), stable end-to-end connections do not always exist. Messages are forwarded, assisted by the mobility of nodes, in a store-carry-forward paradigm. The mobility of nodes in most DTNs has a certain statistical regularity; thus, using historical information in DTNs to compute the delivery quality of nodes can help to select good forwarding nodes. This paper aims to establish a routing scheme based on multihop delivery quality, which is designed to reduce the energy consumption of message forwarding while maintaining a high delivery rate. We characterized the multihop delivery quality of each node with an expected delay and an expected probability, parameterized by the remaining hop count. Based on these two quality metrics, we developed two algorithms, namely, the delay-inferred forwarding (DIF) algorithm and the probability-inferred forwarding (PIF) algorithm. The basic idea of DIF and PIF is to find the optimal forwarding path by minimizing the expected delay and by maximizing the expected probability, respectively, in the hop graph that is defined in this paper. We performed extensive trace-driven simulations to compare our algorithm to other representative routing algorithms using several real traces. We observed the following: 1) Compared with the delegation algorithm, which uses one-hop delivery quality, both DIF and PIF significantly improve the message delivery rate, and they yield more improvements as the mobility of nodes becomes more regular; and 2) compared with the state-of-the-art optimal opportunistic forwarding (OOF) algorithm, which also uses a multihop delivery quality, DIF and PIF have significantly smaller forwarding overhead (with the maximum reduction in the number of forwarding being over 40%), whereas they are quite close to OOF in terms of both delivery rate and average delay.