Adaptive Randomized Epidemic Routing for Disruption Tolerant Networks

In disruption tolerant networks, aggressive packet forwarding scheme like flooding has a major drawback in terms of network congestion. In this paper, we proposed a new routing algorithm, called adaptive randomized epidemic routing (ARER). ARER dynamically adjusts the forwarding probability for each message according to a new metric, replications density. Meanwhile, ARER arranges the forwarding sequence and the dropping priority based on their assigned weight. The weight is determined by the replication density, the delivery predictability, and TTL. An extensive simulation of ARER using various scenarios was carried out and its performance was compared to well known DTN routing protocols: epidemic routing, randomized routing and spray-and-wait routing. Our results show that ARER outperforms them in all scenarios in terms of packet delay and delivery.