Efficient Interdomain Multicast Delivery in Disruption Tolerant Networks

Mobile nodes in some challenging network scenarios suffer from intermittent connectivity and frequent partitions e.g. battlefield and disaster recovery scenarios. Disruption tolerant network (DTN) technologies are designed to enable nodes in such environments to communicate with one another. In the past, we have proposed two intradomain multicast routing schemes, namely the context-aware multicast routing (CAMR) and encounter-based multicast routing (EBMR) schemes. In this paper, we consider the problem of routing multicast messages across different domains. We present a ferry based interdomain multicast delivery scheme where a ferry is used to deliver multicast messages across groups that are partitioned and a variant of the encounter-based multicast routing scheme is used as the intradomain routing scheme for intradomain delivery. We then present simulation results using different group mobility models to illustrate the usefulness of the scheme we design. Our results indicate that the scheme we design can achieve high delivery ratio with reasonable data efficiency. Our results also indicate that the delivery ratio seen using a more realistic VANET model is slightly worse than that seen using the RPGM model.