BALANCE: A Robust Routing Protocol in Self-Organized Civilian DTN

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) architecture has emerged to cope up with loss of continuous connectivity issue that may occur under some environmental conditions such as infrastructure down due to disaster. Bundle protocols generally enhance network delay and reliability by storing and forwarding data-packed bundles on multiple nodes in the same time through flooding algorithm. On the other hand, the flooding mechanism usually incurs a consumption of resources. In this paper, we propose a robust routing protocol called BALANCE for self-organized civilian DTN. In civilian contexts, a resource constraint is a primary issue. So, our BALANCE sets an objective function to minimize the number of replications over networks by using a regression model for predicting future spreading effect considering the delivering probability. Since the device owners (civilian) could be selfish and decide not to store or forward any bundles, we further introduce a selfish factor applied together with our newly formulated SINR-based function to achieve the delivering probability. We conduct evaluations in stationary and mobile scenarios regarding disaster situations. The results show the highest traded-off values of delivering performance and resource consumption of the proposed protocol compared to widely-used protocols and present our superior in restricted conditions like limited buffer size or selfish participants.