SARP - A Novel Multi-Copy Routing Protocol for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

This paper introduces a multi-copy routing protocol, called Self Adaptive Routing Protocol (SARP), for intermittently connected mobile networks. SARP aims to exploring the possibility of taking nodes as carriers of messages to be delivered among network partitions. The choice of the best carrier for a message is made according to the prediction based on the history of nodal encounters. The paper will argue that the movement of the nodes and their possible future collocation with the recipient of the messages can be used to make intelligent message forwarding decisions. The proposed protocol has been implemented and compared to a number of existing encounter-based routing approaches, where a near-realistic mobility model is used for testing. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated in terms of delivery delay and the number of transmissions performed. The results of the simulation show that the proposed technique outperforms all existing multi-copy encounter-based routing protocols. Index terms: DTN, multi-copy routing.