A bio-network based custody transfer architecture for DTNs

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) is a class of networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions due to sparse distribution of nodes. In DTNs intermittently connected links and long, variable latency occurs frequently. Some well-known assumptions of traditional networks are no longer true in DTNs. Custody transfer is a proposed DTN reliability mechanism to enhance end-to-end reliability. This mechanism utilizes hop-by-hop transfer of delivery responsibility. This paper presents the custody transfer mechanism facing problems of duplicate message fragments and limited storage resources, which can prevent further traffic flowing even when some outgoing connections are available. Then a new custody transfer scheme based on bio-network is adopted. We build a custody transfer model on the bio-network platform. We examine the performance of this new scheme and show that it can increase the end-to-end reliability. At last, a simulation study is presented and analyzed. Results reveal the superiority of the bio-network scheme in comparison to the present scheme.