Reliable Anonymous Multicasting in Disruption Tolerant Networks

Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are characterized by opportunistic connectivity due to frequent network partitioning. Protocols used in wired and wireless networks have assumed the existence of end-to-end paths from a source to a destination, which is not true in DTNs applications. Our focus in this work is to propose a scheme that deterministically guarantees message delivery to all multicast receivers in DTNs making controlled use of non-multicast nodes to reduce message delivery latency. The paper also introduces a new measure called termination delay and simulation results show that our scheme has much smaller termination delay than schemes in literature. Second, we extend our reliability scheme to provide anonymity of multicast receivers in the group. We show through simulations that even in the presence of malicious nodes the performance degradation of message delivery latency and termination latency is not any worse than schemes currently proposed in literature.