Energy efficient Reactive Store-and-Forward protocol for intermittently connected networks

Hop-by-hop transport and in-network storage have been widely used in intermittently connected networks. As a way to provide hop-by-hop congestion control, backpressure has been used in hop-by-hop transport and in-network storage protocols to provide quick congestion alleviation. However, relying on backpressure to direct traffic can introduce large packet delays, especially when traffic load is light, which in turn can degrade the energy efficiency of the system. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer protocol, Reactive Store-and-Forward (ReSaF). This protocol adopts a conditional-forwarding routing algorithm to route packets on a per-block basis. The conditional-forwarding algorithm takes advantage of estimated delivery probability, available buffer space and energy level of nodes to provide an energy efficient way to delivery packets with a high rate of success.