Study of visiting frequency in a delay tolerant network

In a disruption/delay tolerant network, message carriers are often used to act as relays between segregated nodes and gateways. In this paper, we study a special routing problem for message carriers in delay tolerant networks, the visiting frequency problem. Specifically, we present a detailed analysis on a near-optimal visiting frequency on the nodes in a subregion of the network, to ensure low average message delay, using a partitioning-based optimization approach. Then we propose a multiple visit algorithm and apply the above near-optimal visiting frequency to our multiple visit algorithm, to guarantee the low average message delay for the network. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our new algorithm comparing with the existing single visit algorithms.