A data forwarding scheme with reachable probability centrality in DTNs

Node mobility and end-to-end disconnections in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) greatly weaken the effectiveness of data transmission. Although social-based strategies can be used to deal with the problem, most existing approaches adopt multicopy strategy to forward messages which inevitably add more unnecessary cost. One of the most important issues is the selection of the best intermediate node to forward messages to the destination node. In this paper, we focus on finding a quality metric associated with better relays which is evaluated by Reachable Probability Centrality (RPC) as we proposed. RPC combines the contact matrix and multi-hop forwarding probability based on the weighted social network, thus ensuring an effective relay selection. We also propose a distributed RPC-based routing algorithm, which demonstrates the applicability of our scheme in the decentralized environment of DTNs. Extensive trace-driven simulations show that RPC outperforms other centrality measures and our proposed routing algorithm can significantly reduce the data forwarding cost while having comparable delivery ratio and delay to those of the Epidemic routing.