Multiple-copy Routing in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

Intermittently connected mobile networks are wireless networks where most of the time there does not exist a complete path from the source to the destination. There are many real networks that fall into this paradigm, for example, wildlife tracking sensor networks, military networks, inter-planetary networks, etc. In this context, conventional routing schemes would fail. To deal with such networks researchers have suggested to use flooding-based routing schemes. While floodingbased schemes have a high probability of delivery, they waste a lot of energy and suffer from severe contention which can significantly degrade their performance. With this in mind, we introduce a new routing scheme, called Spray and Wait, that “sprays” a number of copies into the network, and then “waits” till one of these nodes meets the destination. We compare this scheme to a number of different routing algorithms including an oracle-based optimal algorithm that minimizes average message delivery delay while using the lowest possible number of transmissions. Theory and simulations show that Spray and Wait has a number of desirable properties: it is very simple to implement, it is highly scalable, it performs close to the optimal scheme, and quite surprisingly, it outperforms all existing schemes with respect to both average message delivery delay and number of transmissions per message delivered.

[1]  R. Durrett.  Probability: Theory and Examples , 1993 .

[2]  David A. Maltz,et al.  A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols , 1998, MobiCom '98.

[3]  Charles E. Perkins,et al.  Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector routing , 1999, Proceedings WMCSA'99. Second IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications.

[4]  Piyush Gupta,et al.  Critical Power for Asymptotic Connectivity in Wireless Networks , 1999 .

[5]  Yu-Chee Tseng,et al.  The Broadcast Storm Problem in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network , 1999, Wirel. Networks.

[6]  Panganamala Ramana Kumar,et al.  RHEINISCH-WESTFÄLISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE AACHEN , 2001 .

[7]  Xiangchuan Chen,et al.  Enabling Disconnected Transitive Communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks , 2001 .

[8]  Jean-Luc Meunier,et al.  Pollen: using people as a communication medium , 2001, Comput. Networks.

[9]  David A. Maltz,et al.  DSR: the dynamic source routing protocol for multihop wireless ad hoc networks , 2001 .

[10]  David Tse,et al.  Mobility increases the capacity of ad hoc wireless networks , 2002, TNET.

[11]  Maria Udén,et al.  Providing connectivity to the Saami nomadic community , 2002 .

[12]  Yong Wang,et al.  Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking: design tradeoffs and early experiences with ZebraNet , 2002, ASPLOS X.

[13]  Philippe Bonnet,et al.  Smart-tag based data dissemination , 2002, WSNA '02.

[14]  Anders Lindgren,et al.  Probabilistic routing in intermittently connected networks , 2003, MOCO.

[15]  Kevin C. Almeroth,et al.  Towards realistic mobility models for mobile ad hoc networks , 2003, MobiCom '03.

[16]  Qun Li,et al.  Communication in disconnected ad hoc networks using message relay , 2003, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[17]  Matthias Grossglauser,et al.  Age matters: efficient route discovery in mobile ad hoc networks using encounter ages , 2003, MobiHoc '03.

[18]  Waylon Brunette,et al.  Data MULEs: modeling and analysis of a three-tier architecture for sparse sensor networks , 2003, Ad Hoc Networks.

[19]  Vinton G. Cerf,et al.  Delay-tolerant networking: an approach to interplanetary Internet , 2003, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[20]  Cauligi S. Raghavendra,et al.  Single-copy routing in intermittently connected mobile networks , 2004, 2004 First Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2004. IEEE SECON 2004..