A joint replication-migration-based routing in delay tolerant networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) use mobility-assisted routing, where nodes carry, store, and forward data to each other in order to overcome the intermittent connectivity and limited network capacity of this type of network. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol that includes two mechanisms: message replication and message migration. Each mechanism has two steps: message selection and node selection. In message replication, we choose the smallest hop-count message to replicate. The hop-count threshold is used to control the replication speed. We propose a metric called 2-hop activity level to measure the relay node´s transmission capacity, which is used in node selection. Our protocol includes a novel message migration policy that is used to overcome the limited buffer space and bandwidth of DTN nodes. We validate our protocol via extensive simulation experiments; we use a combination of synthetic and real mobility traces.