Active Congestion Control Based Routing for Opportunistic Delay Tolerant Networks

Opportunistic Networks (ONs) utilize the communication opportunity with a hop-by-hop behavior, and implement communication between encountered nodes based on the Store-and-Forward routing pattern. This approach, which is totally different from the traditional communication model, has received extensive interests from academic community. We consider the ONs are a type of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) since their routing behavior are quite same regardless of the bundle layer protocol. Until currently, a set of congestion control mechanisms have been proposed in Deterministic DTNs, which is mainly implemented in the network with limited mobility or the static network with scheduled disruption interval. However, regarding the networks with large topology variation, known as Opportunistic DTNs, to design a congestion control mechanism is difficult. In this paper, we propose an active congestion control based routing algorithm that pushes the selected message before the congestion happens. In order to predict the future congestion situation, a corresponding estimation function is designed and our proposed algorithm works based on two asynchronous routing functions, which are scheduled according to the decision of estimation function. Simulation results show our proposed algorithm efficiently utilizes the distributed storage to achieve a quite low overhead ratio and also performs well in the realistic scenario.