Epidemic-Based Controlled Flooding and Adaptive Multicast for Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) is a kind of sparse Ad Hoc networks in which no contemporaneous path exists between any two nodes most of the time. Multicasting in DTN is a desirable feature for applications where some form of group communication is in demand. In this paper, we propose a multicast protocol for DTN: ECAM (Epidemic-based Controlled Flooding and Adaptive Multicast for Delay Tolerant Networks). It limits the time and range of message transmission, so that the huge consumption of network resources caused by flooding can be saved. Meanwhile, ECAM adopts the adaptive mechanism to work well under diverse network conditions with different node densities. We study its performance through comparative simulations in the Qual Net networks simulator. The simulation results show that ECAM could outperform existing epidemic approaches. Our routing strategies can achieve higher message delivery ratios and lower average message copies.