Message prioritization of epidemic forwarding in delay-tolerant networks

Delay-tolerant networking is the innovation of extending the capabilities of communication networks in the temporal domain. It is an essential technology to enhance data communications in extreme scenarios, where crucial messages must be transferred with the infrastructure rendered unavailable or hostile. In this work, we consider the problem of disseminating a large number of messages in such networks. With the sparse and intermittently connected topology and with the unreliable and low-rate radios, the strategy of which messages to transfer first and in what order is a determinant of performance here. We compare a few such message prioritization methods using computer simulation and observe their performance in terms how widely and quickly information can be distributed across the network.