A novel routing method for improving message delivery delay in hybrid DTN-MANET networks

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) has drawn attention of many researchers due to its ability to construct a network without any infrastructure. In MANET, mobile nodes can transmit packets by using multi-hop paradigm. However, with the high probability of link disruption, the performance of this network decreases with the increase of hop count between the source and destination. On the other hand, Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Network (DTN) is more tolerant to the link disruption. These two types of networks can have different advantages depending on communication environments. Therefore, we focus on a system which is able to switch the routing method, i.e., DTN or MANET, in conformity with the change of communication environment. In this paper, we provide an adequate comparison between the performances of two transmission methods of MANET and DTN. With the aim of reducing the number of transmissions, we propose a routing method which combines both transmission methods. Simulation results show that our proposed method can significantly reduce the number of transmissions and it leads to lowering message delivery delay.