Performance evaluation of scalable and energy efficient dynamic n-epidemic routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

In this paper a variant to epidemic propagation scheme applied to Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) is proposed. It extends the approach proposed in the basic epidemic routing and adopts the forwarding scheme of the n-Epidemic routing. However, differently from n-Epidemic, it applies a dynamic forwarding scheme based on nodes density that is able to reduce energy consumption and increase message delivery probability. The performance of our idea have been evaluated through a deep campaign of simulations, verifying that the proposed extended epidemic approach leads the system to an overall enhancement. Simulation campaigns have been led out evaluating the message delivery ratio, the average hop count, the average end-to-end delay and the average residual energy.