Improving routing protocol performance in delay tolerant networks using extended information

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless mobile networks that do not guarantee the existence of a path between a source and a destination at any time. When two nodes move within each other's transmission range during a period of time, they can contact each other. The contact of nodes can be periodical, predictable and nonpredictable. In this paper, we assume the contact of nodes is nonpredictable so that it can reflect the most flexible way of nodes movement. Due to the uncertainty and time-varying nature of DTNs, routing poses special challenges. Some existing schemes use utility functions to steer the routing in the right direction. We find that these schemes do not capture enough information of the network. Thus, we develop an extended information model that can capture more mobility information and use regression functions for data processing. Experimental results from both our own simulator and real wireless trace data show that our routing algorithms based on the extended information model can increase the delivery ratio and reduce the delivery latency of routing compared with existing ones. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.