Epidemic theory based H+1 hop forwarding for intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks

In intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks, how to guarantee the packet delivery ratio and reduce the transmission delay has become the new challenge for the researchers. Epidemic theory based routing had shown the better performance in the aspect of improving transmission successful rate and reducing the delay, which under the situation that there is no limitation of the node buffer and network bandwidth. In general, epidemic routing adopts the 2-hop or multi-hop forwarding mode to forward the relay packet. However, these two modes have the obvious disadvantage. In this article, we introduce a novel H + 1 hop forwarding mode that is based on the epidemic theory. First, we utilize the susceptible infected recovered model of epidemic theory to estimate the amount of relay node (epidemic equilibrium) and the delivery delay within the epidemic process. Second, we formulate the amount number of relay nodes into a single absorbing Markov chain model. Based on the Markov chain, we estimate the expected delay for the packet transmission. Simulation results show that compared with the basic epidemic and Spray and Wait protocols, the H + 1 hop forwarding mode has the better performance on the delivery delay and amount of copies.