AAR: Agent aided routing for faster and efficient spreading of messages in Delay Tolerant Networks

Routing schemes in Delay Tolerant Networks depend on the intermediate nodes to carry messages till the forwarding of the messages to other nodes or delivery of the messages to their destinations. Thus, efficient and faster spreading of messages is essential to reduce the delay of sending a message from source to destination. In this work, we aim to design a new agent aided routing scheme in Delay Tolerant Networks to avoid large message delivery delay. Here, the source of a message is permitted to create unlimited copies of a message and distribute these copies to agents. Agents acting as the representative of the sources receive messages from the sources based on their node visited list and delivery predictability. After that, the agents forward the copies to the other intermediate nodes or deliver the message directly to the destination. Thus, the agents help in faster and efficient dissemination of a message in the network which helps in reducing message delivery delay. Besides, we compare our scheme with that of other schemes through simulations. Simulation results show that our agent based routing scheme performs better than that of others in different network scenarios.