A practical routing strategy in Delay Tolerant Networks using multiple pigeons

The development of delay tolerant networks (DTN) has attracted significant attention in the networking research community. In this paper, we investigate a new type of delay tolerant network - homing pigeon based DTN (HoP-DTN) system. In HoP-DTN, each node owns multiple dedicated messengers (called pigeons), and each pigeon will take a round trip starting from its home, through the destination nodes and then return home, disseminating the messages on its way. The proposed scheme is a practical and effective way to overcome end-to-end disconnection in DTN. We obtain the average message delay of the scheme through theoretical analysis. The analytical model is validated by simulations. We also study the effects of several key parameters on system performance.