Hop-by-hop reliable, parallel message propagation for intermittently-connected mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks suffer from intermittent connectivity, and thus hop-by-hop reliability and parallel message propagation, which DTN researches have explored, can be applied to allow scalable message propagation over such challenged network environments. We implemented those communication schemes onto UTMesh - 50-node scale wireless mesh network testbed, and studied the delivery patterns. On the evaluation result with UTMesh, we have confirmed (1) that hop-by-hop reliability scheme achieves scalable message propagation (e.g., 23 hops), and (2) that message propagation speed increases as the redundancy-level increases. We have also observed that the smallest hop count path does not always achieve the fastest message delivery. This was probably because longer distant links were unstable and message paths over short distant links provided faster propagation.