A Novel Congestion Control Strategy in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay-Tolerant Networks(DTN) are wireless networks where disconnections may occur frequently due to node mobility, power outages and propagation phenomena. In order to achieve data delivery, store-and-forward protocols are used in DTN and routing protocols based on epidemic message dissemination has been proposed, such as Epidemic routing. Under Epidemic routing, packets can be completely delivered between any two nodes if each node buffer is big enough and the communication time is long enough after one node contacts another one. But congestion will occur easily at one node if the buffer of this node is limited under epidemic routing in DTN. In order to solve this problem, a novel congestion control strategy called average forwarding number based on epidemic routing(AFNER) has been proposed based on epidemic routing protocols. Using simulations based on a random waypoint model, the results show the improvement of AFNER congestion control strategy.