TTL based MaxProp routing protocol

Routing messages in sparse and intermittently connected networks is one of the major challenging issues in Delay Tolerant Networking as an end-to-end path between the source and the destination is absent most of the time. To deal with this problem a wide range of routing protocols have emerged over time. One such protocol is MaxProp-which prioritizes both the schedule of packets to be transmitted (based on their hop count) and the schedule of packets to be dropped (based on their delivery likelihood) by splitting the buffer into two portions. In this paper, we propose a Time-To-Live (TTL)-based routing scheme that prioritizes the schedule of packets to be transmitted not only based on their hop count but also based on their TTL values. In our scheme, messages with high TTL values are taken into special consideration which saves them from being dropped earlier. A series of simulation has been carried out and the results show that our TTL based routing scheme significantly improves the number of delivered messages reducing the overhead ratio and delay, consuming the same amount of network resources as MaxProp.