Route Design for Multiple Ferries in Delay Tolerant Networks

Routing mechanisms in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) usually rely on nodes' mobilities to bridge gaps in space and time. Though they may depend on the movements of ordinary nodes, it is more desirable to introduce special mobile nodes called ferries dedicated to communication in DTNs. In this paper, we concentrate on the route design problem for multiple ferries. We introduce an analytically tractable model to describe message delivery delay in three different schemes for multiple ferry routing. We give analytical results that reveal the tradeoff between the cost of using more ferries and the performance gains. Driven by the analysis, we propose routing algorithms that can match our theoretical results well. The algorithms are evaluated under extensive network settings via simulations. The results show that our algorithms can reduce the message delivery delay over existing routing algorithms, especially when the nodes are not uniformly distributed in space.

[1]  Waylon Brunette,et al.  Data MULEs: modeling a three-tier architecture for sparse sensor networks , 2003, Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Network Protocols and Applications, 2003..

[2]  Mani B. Srivastava,et al.  Multiple Controlled Mobile Elements (Data Mules) for Data Collection in Sensor Networks , 2005, DCOSS.

[3]  Oliver Brock,et al.  MV routing and capacity building in disruption tolerant networks , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[4]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  Message ferry route design for sparse ad hoc networks with mobile nodes , 2006, MobiHoc '06.

[5]  Mostafa H. Ammar,et al.  Message ferrying: proactive routing in highly-partitioned wireless ad hoc networks , 2003, The Ninth IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems, 2003. FTDCS 2003. Proceedings..

[6]  Chang-Gun Lee,et al.  Partitioning based mobile element scheduling in wireless sensor networks , 2005, 2005 Second Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2005. IEEE SECON 2005..

[7]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Intelligent fluid infrastructure for embedded networks , 2004, MobiSys '04.

[8]  David S. Johnson,et al.  Asymptotic experimental analysis for the Held-Karp traveling salesman bound , 1996, SODA '96.

[9]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  Controlling the mobility of multiple data transport ferries in a delay-tolerant network , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[10]  Mani B. Srivastava,et al.  Mobile element scheduling for efficient data collection in wireless sensor networks with dynamic deadlines , 2004, 25th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium.

[11]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  A message ferrying approach for data delivery in sparse mobile ad hoc networks , 2004, MobiHoc '04.

[12]  Kevin R. Fall,et al.  A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.