Replication routing for Delay Tolerant Networking: A hybrid between utility and geographic approach

Without the assumption of contemporaneous end to end connectivity in challenged wireless networks, Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing is an important research area. The contribution in this paper is to take advantage of the proposed DTN geographic replication to overcome the limitation of topology based utility replication, since message replication is prevented due to the local maximum problem that the utility metric of encountered node is worse than message carrier. In brief, the proposed DTN geographic replication is activated only if the utility replication is unable to route message, this hybrid approach promotes a seamless message replication given limited message lifetime. Borrowing from the concept of gravity, messages are under prioritized transmission for load balancing and achieving less delivery latency. Extensive simulation results show promising improvement of the proposed algorithm in terms of delivery ratio, transmission cost, average latency as well as number of aborted messages.