A Caching-Based Approach to Routing in Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs), where no connected path generally exists between a source and a destination at any given time, present significant challenges from a routing perspective. A plethora of routing approaches have been previously introduced that make use of node mobility models or probabilistic models of network topology. In this paper, we offer a new perspective by making an analogy between routing table construction in DTNs and caching in program execution. In this approach, each node uses a simple caching heuristic to choose a subset of previously encountered nodes to be its routing neighbors. The approach is evaluated and shows good performance while keeping the implementation very simple.