Network Coding for Applications in the Delay Tolerant Network (DTN)

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) use a store-carry-forward communication model relying on the mobility of nodes because a persistent end-to-end path from source to destination generally does not exist. Epidemic routing is a typical protocol in which data can be replicated along multiple opportunistic paths. With the advent of network coding, it is intuitive that data can not only be replicated, but also coded, when the transmission opportunity arises. In this paper we have implemented the epidemic routing with network coding based on the qualnet platform to validate this theory. What's more, to obtain better performance we introduced adaptive scheduling mechanism. We analytically show that with network coding, the performances of the network including the delivery delay, throughput and the delivery rate have been improved, reflecting many realistic scenarios. And through the simulation result, the correctness of our analysis is confirmed. To sum up, our research will generate a significant impact on DTN, as one focus of future network.