Application-Aware Disruption Tolerant Network

When low power mobile devices communicate over short range wireless networks using technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee etc., the contacts are often opportunistic and intermittent due to range, mobility and energy constraint. While the DTN architecture provides a framework to support opportunistic and intermittent connectivities, existing DTN routing algorithms do not consider application requirements. In particular, if data block dependencies of applications are known to the network nodes, resource control mechanisms can utilize this knowledge to improve performance. The contributions of this paper are as follow. First, we propose a mechanism to quantify application data dependencies and show how this information can be exploited by resource control mechanisms. Next, we show how application data dependencies information can be incorporated into existing DTN routing algorithms to improve performance. Simulation results show that when application awareness is exploited, we can substantially improve application performance from 60% to 583% over the baseline DTN routing algorithms.