Buffer scheduling policy in DTN routing protocols

Delay Tolerant Networks are with intermittent connectivity, high latency and without end-to-end paths from the source to the destination. Message delivering in these networks is characterized by store-and-forward. So the sequence of message delivering and discarding is important to the performance of routing algorithms. However, there is little effort concentrating on buffer management optimization, which can effectively utilize the limited resource. In this paper, we employ optimal theory to propose a novel buffer management strategy named Optimal Buffer Management (OBM) to optimize the sequence of message forwarding and message discarding. In OBM strategy, globe optimization considering delivery ratio, delay, and overhead is adopt to improve the overall performance of routing algorithms. The simulation results also show that the OBM policy is much better than the existing ones in delivery ratio, delay, and overhead.