Cost Efficient Erasure Coding Based Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Routing in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) in which most of the nodes are mobile and intermittently connected is a challenging problem because of unpredictable node movements and lack of knowledge of future node connections. To ensure reliability against failures and increase the success rate of delivery, erasure coding technique is used to route messages in DTNs. In this paper, we study how the cost of erasure coding based routing protocols can be reduced. Specifically, we analyze the effects of different spraying algorithms, right parameter selection and splitting spraying phase on the cost of message delivery. We also perform simulations to evaluate the proposed approaches and demonstrate that the cost of erasure coding based routing can be reduced considerably with the proposed strategies while maintaining the delivery rate and delay objectives.