A Time-slice Based Hybrid Routing for Delay Tolerant Networks

The non-existence of an end-to-end path poses a challenge in adapting the traditional routing algorithms to delay tolerant networks (DTNs). This paper innovatively puts forward the concept of "time-slice" to make full use of the respective advantages of single copy strategy and multiple-copy strategy thus getting a right balance between high message delivery ratio and low network overloads. We investigate making the routing decision based only on no more than one-hop information of neighbor nodes so as to enhance the practicability of our routing by reducing the complexity of neighbor discovery. Then a time-slice based hybrid routing protocol is proposed. Simulation results show that our proposed routing achieves the overall best performance than other protocols. When the network resource is constrained, our proposed routing scheme is more scalable than others. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.