Vector Routing for Delay Tolerant Networks

Recently, much research work has paid attention to delay tolerant networks (DTNs), which are networks with a frequent occurrences of network partitioning. Since the successful establishment of an end-to-end path between source and destination nodes is not guaranteed in these networks, routing is a challenging issue. In typical routing protocols for DTNs such as epidemic routing, they depend on data replication techniques over multiple paths for reliable data delivery. However, they invoke a large number of duplicated packets in the network. This paper therefore proposes an efficient routing (called vector routing) by utilizing the vector of node movements. In vector routing, the direction and velocity of nodes are calculated from the location information of nodes, and then nodes efficiently decide which nodes should take replicated packets as well as the number of packets to replicate. Using ns-2 simulation with two different mobility models, namely random waypoint and manhattan mobility models, we verify that vector routing performs better than epidemic routing in terms of less amount of traffic incurred without loss of packet delivery ratio.