A partially centralized messaging control scheme using star topology in delay and disruption tolerant networks

Terminal-to-terminal communication technology has been studied to make communication and information distribution possible in an area, where communication infrastructure has been damaged or is not present, such as disaster area or rural area. Since mobile communication devices have short transmission range and high mobility owing to it bringing held by human beings, the network consisting of those nodes suffers from challenging conditions such as intermittent connectivity and absence of the end-to-end path between source and destination. To conquer that, Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) using store-and-forward approach has attracted much research attention. In general routing algorithms, DTNs nodes exchange the control messages, e.g. the summary vector messages and request messages to know which messages each node possesses and to request replicated messages. However, the number of control messages being exchanged increases with the increase of node density. Furthermore, the size of a control message is proportional according to the number of replicas that shows. To reduce the number of control messages, we propose a partially centralized control scheme using star topology networks. Through our simulations, we show that our proposed method dramatically reduces control overhead in high node density scenarios.