A neighborhood contact history based spraying heuristic for delay tolerant networks

Recent studies based on the mobility traces taken from real delay tolerant networks show that in these networks a node movement does not occur in a totally random way. During movement, there is a greater likelihood that nodes meet again some of their past neighbors. But traditional spraying heuristics of Spray and Wait naively split copies between encountered nodes (for example, binary Spray and Wait halves copies), but do not necessarily use other available information such as neighborhood contact history. If node A encounters node B which might have never contacted with other nodes, handing over half of the copies to such a node means these copies will probably not be transmitted to the destination which is very inefficient. In this paper, we propose a spraying heuristic which is based on neighborhood contact history. For the simulation, we have used Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) Simulator. The simulation results show that our proposed heuristic performs much better than binary spraying heuristic.