Regional token based routing for DTNs

In Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), there are no stable end-to-end paths because the connectivity of nodes is frequently disrupted by their mobility, power saving or other reasons. Nevertheless nodes can communicate each other by a store-and-forward paradigm if there are end-to-end paths on the union of network snapshots over time. Many previous studies have proposed routing protocols adopting this paradigm. We propose Regional Token Based Routing (RTBR) that reflect mobility patterns of real users. The real networks may consist of several sub networks (called “regions”) and have mobile nodes that move within regions or between regions. RTBR exploits node mobility and region information. It assigns “tokens” for each region to messages and sprays message copies into the regions as many as tokens for each region. Using simulation, we show that RTBR outperforms over 25% better delivery ratio than other flooding based schemes and maintains low overhead.