Routing over Interconnected Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Intermittent Connections

The recent years have seen an enormous advance in wireless communication technology and a wide spread of various types of wireless networks. It requires effective inter-networking among the heterogeneous wireless networks in order to support user roaming over the networks while maintaining the connectivity. One of main challenges to achieve the connectivity over a heterogeneous wireless network is potential intermittent connections caused by user roaming. The issue is how to maintain the connection as the user roams and how to ensure service quality in the presence of a long disconnection period. In this paper, we apply the concept of delay tolerant network (DTN) framework to heterogeneous terrestrial wireless networks, and propose a routing scheme to ensure successful communication over an information transport platform that can encounter excessive long delays and intermittent paths. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the epidemic routing based scheme.