Social routing: A novel routing protocol for delay tolerant network based on dynamic connectivity

There exist numerous routing protocols proposed to allow efficient routing in the network where the end-to-end paths are spontaneously unstable. Such networks are termed as Delay-tolerant-networks (DTNs). The existing famous routing protocols still remain important issues that need to be solved. For example, Epidemic quickly drains the resources of the network; PROPHET causes the unbalanced traffic load distribution between the nodes, and Fair-Route increases the delivery delay. Moreover, such protocols do not have a signal to notify the buffers to remove redundant copies of a message when the first copy of that message has been successfully delivered to the destination. We therefore propose Social Routing, a contacts history based routing protocol, resolves those problems. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol significantly obtains the balanced traffic load distribution between nodes, reduces the delivery delay, and provides better delivery ratio compared with other protocols.