Selective Message Forwarding in Delay Tolerant Networks

It is challenging to deliver messages in a network where no instant end-to-end path exists, so called delay-tolerant network (DTN). Node encounters are used for message forwarding. In this paper, we propose a DTN routing protocol SMART. SMART utilizes the travel companions of the destinations (i.e. nodes that frequently meet the destination) to increase the delivery opportunities while limiting message overhead to a bounded number. Our approach differs from related work in that it does not propagate node encounter history nor the delivery probabilities derived from the encounter history. In SMART, a message source injects a fixed number of message copies into the network to forward the message to a companion of the destination, which only forwards the message to a fixed number of the destination’s companions. Our analysis and simulation results show that SMART has a higher delivery ratio and a smaller delivery latency than the schemes that only use controlled opportunistically-forwarding mechanism and has a significantly smaller routing overhead than a pure flooding scheme.