Epidemic routing with immunity in Delay Tolerant Networks

In this paper, we modify and extend epidemic routing used in intermittent networks such as delay tolerant networks (DTNs). In particular, we propose to include immunity-based information disseminated in the reverse direction once messages get delivered to their destination. There are many variants of epidemic routing that are intended to result in better resource utilization by reducing the number of copies or through the use of sophisticated forwarding policy. Our focus is to use the information of already delivered messages in an immunity-list that will prevent any future exchange of those messages. Through the use of this technique we expect that the percent of delivered messages at lower delays will be higher because of better buffer and network utilization. Our simulation shows statistically significant performance improvement both in delivery ratio and delay for immunity-based epidemic as compared to the basic epidemic protocol.