Enhanced buffer management policy that utilises message properties for delay-tolerant networks

A delay-tolerant network is a network designed so that temporary or intermittent communication problems and limitations have the least possible adverse impact. Two major issues should be considered to achieve data delivery in such challenging networking environments: a routing strategy for the network and a buffer management policy for each node in the network. The routing strategy determines which messages should be forwarded when nodes meet and the buffer management policy determines which message is purged when the buffer overflows in a node. This study proposes an enhanced buffer management policy that utilises message properties. For maximisation of the message deliveries and minimisation of the average delay, two utility functions are proposed on the basis of message properties, particularly the number of replicas, the age and the remaining time-to-live. The experimental results on two types of well-known real-world mobility trace data and synthetic data show that the proposed buffer management policy yields better results over the history-based drop and traditional policies, such as the shortest lifetime first, the most forwarded first in terms of the number of message deliveries and average delay.