Contact Profile Based Routing within Intermittently Connected Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Routing in intermittently connected networks(ICN) is a challenging problem due to the time varying nature of network connectivity. In this work, we focus on a special class of ICN formed by mobile ad-hoc participates called ICMAN. Asynchronous contacts become the basic way of communication in ICMANs instead of data links in traditional ad-hoc networks. Current approaches are primarily based on estimation with pure probability calculation. Stochastic forwarding decisions from statistic results can lead to disastrous routing performance when wrong choices are made. This paper introduces a new routing protocol, based on contact profile, to address the problem. To exploit the knowledge about contact profiles, we propose a contact modeling method and the corresponding contact prediction algorithm makes use of both statistic and time sequence information of contacts and allows to choose the relay that has the earliest contact to destination, which results in low average latency. Simulation is used to compare the routing performance of our algorithm with three other categories of forwarding algorithms proposed already. The results demonstrate that our scheme is more efficient in both data delivery and energy consumption than previously proposed schemes.