Dynamic beaconing control in energy-constrained Delay Tolerant Networks

Due to the uncertainty of network topology and intermittent connectivity among nodes in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), beaconing is used to detect probabilistic contacts. However, it causes the following new problem: beaconing frequency not only influences the probability of message transmission, but also affects the consumption rate of energy. Thus, putting forward a beaconing control strategy in energy-constrained DTNs becomes the key point. In this paper, we propose an efficient and dynamic beaconing control method DBCEC in energy-constrained DTNs based on the time-continuous Markov Model. A linear decline strategy (i.e. DBCEC-L) and exponential decay strategy (i.e. DBCEC-E) are respectively applied to control the beaconing frequency. Simulations based on the synthetic mobility model and real mobility traces are conducted in ONE, and results show that DBCEC-E achieves a better delivery rate without influencing average delay and the overhead ratio, compared with other beaconing control strategies.