Improving Delay-Tolerant Network Performance Using Forward Routing Information (Java)
Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM

The development of delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) has attracted significant attention in the recent years. The concept started with the idea of interplanetary internet and later the DTN Research Group (DTNRG) took up the work concerning the architectural and protocol design principles for the DTNs. A DTN can be regarded as a group of highly disconnected networks/regions where the communication environment may be far from ideal with high error rates, large delays and sporadic connectivity with the outside world. In this work we seek to improve the performance of DTNs from two aspects. First, we propose to let the ferries inform the regional gateways forward routing information about their schedule and buffer allocation for the next few rounds. Second, we propose to let regional gateways apply a modified multi-dimensional Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm to the received forward routing information to calculate the path with the shortest multi-dimensional Euclidean distance from source to destination which satisfies multiple QoS requirements of the data (determined by cost and time constraints of the data packets). Thus, the gateways make reasoned decisions after learning about the various routes from source to destination.