Contour routing for peer-to-peer DTN delivery in cellular networks

Cellular networks are designed to provide continuous one-hop connectivity between base stations and mobile nodes. This architecture provides good delay characteristic but suffers from traffic overloading, as the traffic demand grows rapidly. Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing that uses peer-to-peer message delivery between mobile nodes is a possible solution to alleviate the overloading problem. Essentially, it takes advantage of the tradeoff between delay and traffic overhead. In DTN routing, the message delivery from the source node to the destination node is done via data forwarding of other nodes or message carrying without using the cellular network links. Existing DTN routing schemes typically rely on some sorts of limited flooding to prevent traffic explosion. In this paper, we propose a novel DTN routing scheme that utilizes the location information in addition to limited flooding. Our scheme does not require expensive location tracking methods like GPS or triangulation. Instead, we use RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) which is available in virtually all types of wireless networks. We use this rough information on the location of the destination node to achieve similar performance to the existing DTN routing schemes with lower traffic overhead. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by both analytic modeling and extensive simulations.