Back-Pressure Routing for Intermittently Connected Networks

We study a mobile wireless network where groups or clusters of nodes are intermittently connected via mobile "carriers\´\´ (the carriers provide connectivity over time among different clusters of nodes). Over such networks (an instantiation of a delay tolerant network), it is well-known that traditional routing algorithms perform very poorly. In this paper, we propose a two-level Back- Pressure with Source-Routing algorithm (BP+SR) for such networks. The proposed BP+SR algorithm separates routing and scheduling within clusters (fast time-scale) from the communications that occur across clusters (slow time-scale), without loss in network throughput (i.e., BP+SR is throughput-optimal). More importantly, for a source and destination node that lie in different clusters, the traditional back-pressure algorithm results in large queue lengths at each node along its path. This is because the queue dynamics are driven by the slowest time-scale (i.e., that of the carrier nodes) along the path between the source and destination, which results in very large end-to-end delays. On the other-hand, we show that the two-level BP+SR algorithm maintains large queues only at a very few nodes, and thus results in order-wise smaller end-to-end delays. We provide analytical as well as simulation results to confirm our claims.