New Forwarding Strategy for PROPHET Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks DTNs are based on the concept of store-carry and forward protocols: a node may store a message in its buffer and carry it for a long period of time, until an appropriate forwarding opportunity arises. DTNs are able to provide communication services in areas where there is no guarantee that a fully connected path between source and destination exists at any time, and seek to address the technical routing issues in wireless networks. Traditional routing protocols are unable to deliver messages between hosts in such conditions. In this paper, we address the problem of routing in DTNs and propose a new forwarding strategy based on the predictability control of a probabilistic routing model. This strategy increase the number of received messages without increasing the rate of relayed messages, which is more suitable regarding the battery power limitation of mobile nodes. Simulation results show that our new forwarding strategy performs better than the PROPHET routing solution well known by the research community.