Traffic Light Routing Based on Node State Awareness in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs), a supplementary means of communication network in extreme situations, have aroused wide attention from scholars. However, it is challenging to efficiently utilize DTNs since they have intermittent and high-latency characteristics. In the design of DTNs routing scheme, the selection of relay nodes takes on a great significance in efficient communication. However, existing research has either considered only one of the node features, or simply fused node attributes without fully using their potential correlations. If the above problems are not effectively solved, the propagation of messages between nodes will become blind, and a considerable number of caches will be occupied and wasted by invalid copies. To solve the above challenges, a novel routing, “Traffic Light Routing Based on Node State Awareness (TLRNSA)”, is proposed for efficient communication. To be specific, the node's own state, the environmental state, and the historical encounter state are synthesized. The traffic value of the node is obtained based on the adaptive weight adjustment mechanism. The node is divided into three traffic light states, including red, green, and yellow, in accordance with the traffic value. Different routing strategies are developed for the above three states to enhance their performance. The results of the comprehensive experiments suggested that TLRNSA outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in delivery rate and latency. Compared with the two classic algorithms and the two optimized algorithms, the proposed method increases the delivery rate by 109.1%, 84.12%, 5.09%, and 1.09%, respectively, it reduces the delay by 32.16%, 36.46%, 32.77%, and 6.77%, respectively.