An intelligent approach in delay tolerant network routing

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless intermittent networks. DTNs have different applications such as wildlife tracking, military, and space searching. Conventional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols are not efficient in these networks because of intermittency. DTNs use store-carry-forward (SCF) for data transferring. In SCF, nodes store the messages and carry them until finding appropriate nodes for forwarding. Message replication greatly helps to improve the delivery ratio while increasing overhead. This paper examines the use of intelligent routing to choose nodes that have more probability to reach their destination. This will help to increase the message delivery ratio while reducing overhead. The proposed method, SADTN, uses simulated annealing (SA), which has shown successful results in finding global minimal, to find the next hop. Comparison of the proposed method to previously implemented methods such as epidemic routing (ER) and Probabilistic ROuting Protocol using History of Encounters and Transitivity (PROPHET), which are usually used for evaluating other methods, shows increasing message delivery ratio and decreasing over head in SADTN. Overhead in SADTN has on average fallen to 0.01484 of ER and 0.02325 of PROPHET. This is a great advantage of SADTN.