Improving Delivery Ratio with a Handoff-Based Deterministic Routing Protocol (HDRP) in DTN

In Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), Epidemic, PRoPHET and Spray and Wait protocols work by distributing one or more message copies (Bundles). They can naturally adapt to the mobile situation where the destination node moves from an old connection endpoint to a new connection endpoint because any Bundle copy may luckily be able to reach the new connection endpoint where the mobile node is newly connected. However they suffer from low delivery ratio because their routing decisions are based on the local knowledge given by the next hop node and the forwarding is done opportunistically. To solve this problem, we propose a Handoff-based Deterministic Routing Protocol (HDRP) where the handoff mechanism includes the registration of locations by mobile nodes and backward propagation and caching of these locations at each of the routers in the experienced route. Our simulation results indicate that HDRP outperforms other existing protocols providing a high delivery ratio.