Integrating Forwarding and Replication in DTN Routing: A Social Network Perspective

Due to the lack of end-to-end paths between the communication sources and destinations, the routing of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) exploits the store-carry-and-forward mechanism. In this new routing mechanism, how to efficiently integrate forwarding and replication mechanisms is significant for achieving high message delivery ratio while requiring low delivery cost. In this paper, by using famous social properties such as communities and centrality, we design a routing scheme efficiently Integrating Forwarding and Replication (IFR), which allow node to replicate messages in the same community and to forward messages outside the community according to delivery weight obtained from node centrality. Realistic traces based simulations show that our scheme IFR is efficient in improving the message delivery performance on the tradeoff between the delivery success ratio and total delivery cost.