Reach-and-Spread: A historical geographic routing for delay/disruption tolerant networks

Although geographic routing is an alternative approach to topology routing in delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTNs), sparse network density and high mobility result in challenges to obtain the real time geographic information of destination if taking its mobility into account. Furthermore, sparse network density is also in contrast with high-network density, for handling the local maximum problem that the message carrier cannot find a better candidate node to relay a message. In this article, the authors investigate geographic routing in DTNs from another perspective, assuming the real time geographic information of mobile destination is always unavailable. The key insight is to estimate the movement range of the destination using its historical geographic information, to promote message replication reaching the edge of this range using a Reach Phase and spreading within this range using a Spread Phase. Then, these two phases are combined to promote message delivery within the limited message lifetime. The evaluation of results under the Helsinki city scenario show the advantage of our proposed Reach-and-Spread in terms of delivery ratio and average delivery latency as well as overhead ratio.