Mobile Tendency Based Hybrid Routing for Partially Connected Networks

In Partially Connected Networks, the hop-by-hop forwarding scheme usually ignores the existence of multi-hop path segments, and therefore miss some good forwarding opportunities. In this paper, we proposed a new hybrid routing algorithm that combines the positive aspects of DSR and asynchronous routing in DTN, called Mobile Tendency Based Hybrid Routing (MTHR). MTHR utilizes a multi-hop neighbor discovery mechanism to discover the end-to-end path and partial path in the network. If an available end-to-end path is found, the data will be forwarded by DSR. Otherwise, MTHR will buffer the data as messages, and replicate them to some appropriate relays according to the mobile tendency of mobile nodes. Moreover, MTHR introduces a message forwarding limitation scheme to avoid incomplete message forwarding. An extensive simulation of MTHR was carried out and its performance was compared with DTN routing protocols: Directional Forwarding Routing, Epidemic Routing, and Spray-and-Wait Routing. Our results show that MTHR outperforms them in terms of packet delay and delivery.