Priority scheduling for participatory Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols have been investigated as effective ways to distribute content in scenarios where the producers and consumers of content belong to the same geographical area. Common focus of all these approaches has been on maximising network delivery while treating messages as if they were all worth the same to recipients (i.e., messages are forwarded in a first-encountered/first-forwarded fashion). However, because of battery limitations on mobile devices, it is often the case that not all messages can be delivered. In this paper, we propose a new approach for priority-scheduling in participatory DTNs, whereby both message´s value to the end-user as well as the likelihood of future encounters are combined to make the forwarding decision.