Performance modeling of message-driven based energy-efficient routing in delay-tolerant networks with individual node selfishness

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are wireless mobile networks having intermittent connectivity among the nodes. DTN nodes mostly operate on limited battery power. Hence, in such networks, there is an immediate need to have energy efficient routing protocol, allowing the network to perform better and live longer for a message with lifetime E_t and delivery probability D_p. Most of the work in DTN assumes that all the nodes are co-operative in nature, but in real world, all nodes are not always co-operative, and show some form of selfishness. We propose a message-driven based algorithm add-on to the existing routing protocols (such as Epidemic Routing (ER) and Two-Hop Routing (2HR)), that enables forwards based on individual message lifetime and delivery requirements, there by improving energy efficiency. Further we analytically model the performance of these protocols with energy-efficiency add-on in DTN, with individual node selfishness using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). The results show that the proposed energy-efficient add-on improves the energy efficiency up to 90% for both ER and 2HR protocols. The analysis is validated through extensive simulation.