An Energy-Efficient n-Epidemic Routing Protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks

In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN), as disconnections between nodes are frequent, establishing routing path from the source node to the destination node may not be possible. However, if a node transmits packets to all its encounters, its batteries will be used up quickly. Many researches have been done on routing and forwarding algorithms in DTN, but few of them have explicitly address the energy issue. In this paper, we propose n-epidemic routing protocol, an energy-efficient routing protocol for DTN. The n-epidemic routing protocol is based on the reasoning that in order to reach a large audiences with low number of transmissions, it is better to transmit only when the number of neighbors reaching a certain threshold. We compare the delivery performance of n-epidemic routing protocol with basic epidemic routing protocol using both analytical approach and empirical approach with real experimental dataset. The experiment shows that n-epidemic routing protocol can increase the delivery performance of basic epidemic-routing by 434% averagely.