Multi-policy link state routing for disruption tolerant networks

Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) can be characterized by intermittent network connectivity and unguaranteed end-to-end paths. Replication based routing is often used to improve the message delivery but it suffers from high traffic overhead and uncontrolled forwarding paths. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Policy Link State Routing (MPLSR) protocol to enable message forwarding using controlled replication. MPLSR can forward multiple copies of messages using different paths which are generated based on different metrics. To evaluate the performance of MPLSR, we conduct measurements on both the testbed and NS3-simulator. Results have shown that MPLSR achieves significant performance improvements in delivery ratio and delivery latency in challenged networks compared to replication-based and forwarding-based schemes.