CCS-DTN: Efficient routing in social DTNs based on clustering and network coding

With the development of mobile internet, wireless communications via mobile devices, which is typically in the form of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), becomes a hot research topic. One critical issue in the development of DTNs is the routing. Although there are a lot research works addressing routing issues in DTNs, they handle routing problem from only one or two aspects, which cannot produce an advanced solution to this comprehensive challenge. In view of these defects in the existing works, we propose a novel solution to address the routing issue of one type of DTNs in which mobile nodes can be divided into different clusters. A simple routing protocol can be used for the intra-cluster communication, while, for the inter-cluster one, messages will be forwarded to a relay node, which is selected by a new selection policy, supported by the network coding technique. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance of the routing in DTNs.