Reliable Multicasting in Disruption Tolerant Networks

Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are characterized by frequent network partitioning. This causes network connectivity to be opportunistic. In recent years, many collaborative applications have been envisioned for DTNs. These applications rely on the availability of reliable group communication protocols. To address this challenge in DTNs, we propose a scalable multicasting scheme that deterministically guarantees message delivery to all receivers in the group. Also, our scheme makes controlled use of non-multicast nodes to reduce latency of message delivery. Our work introduces a new measure called termination delay, which is the delay incurred in assuring that the receivers have obtained a copy of the message. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has much smaller delivery latency and termination delay than other schemes in literature.