Conditional shortest path routing in delay tolerant networks

Delay tolerant networks are characterized by the sporadic connectivity between their nodes and therefore the lack of stable end-to-end paths from source to destination. Since the future node connections are mostly unknown in these networks, opportunistic forwarding is used to deliver messages. However, making effective forwarding decisions using only the network characteristics (i.e. average intermeeting time between nodes) extracted from contact history is a challenging problem. Based on the observations about human mobility traces and the findings of previous work, we introduce a new metric called conditional intermeeting time, which computes the average intermeeting time between two nodes relative to a meeting with a third node using only the local knowledge of the past contacts. We then look at the effects of the proposed metric on the shortest path based routing designed for delay tolerant networks. We propose Conditional Shortest Path Routing (CSPR) protocol that routes the messages over conditional shortest paths in which the cost of links between nodes is defined by conditional intermeeting times rather than the conventional intermeeting times. Through trace-driven simulations, we demonstrate that CSPR achieves higher delivery rate and lower end-to-end delay compared to the shortest path based routing protocols that use the conventional intermeeting time as the link metric.