Prediction-based routing with packet scheduling under temporal constraint in delay tolerant networks

Routing in Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) is a challenging problem due to the intermittent connectivity between the nodes. Researchers have proposed many routing protocols that adapt to the temporary connections of DTNs. One classification of routing protocols makes use of historical information to predict future contact patterns for any pair of nodes. However, most existing protocols focus on the probability of a path from the source to the destination without considering the information in a packet which includes the source, destination, size, TTL (Time-To-Live) and limited resources such as available buffer size and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a new prediction-based routing algorithm that takes into account packet information under the conditions of limited transmission opportunities. The goal of this protocol is to increase the overall delivery ratio through scheduling packets at each node. Meanwhile, this protocol may sacrifice some messages´ delivery delay time to some extent. Extensive simulation results with real traces show that our protocol with packet scheduling has better performance than the pure probabilistic routing algorithms in term of delivery ratio. Our protocol´s performance advantage is more obvious for nodes with higher packet intensity and shorter TTL in packets.