Remaining Delivery Time Estimation Based Routing for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

We propose Remaining Delivery Time Estimation based Routing (RDTER), a single-copy routing protocol for intermittently connected mobile networks. Nodes predict the Remaining Delivery Time (RDT) to each destination based on the distance estimations obtained from the recent two consecutive contact records. The distance estimation is set to be proportional to the inter-node encounter age, which is updated with transitivity upon each contact. Packet is forwarded to the encountered node whose RDT estimation to the destination is smaller. RDTER provides better forwarding direction, because a smaller RDT estimation means a node is more likely to meet the destination sooner. Thus the routing performance, especially the average delay could be improved. Simulations show that RDTER performs well under the random waypoint mobility model.