A Link Contact Duration-based Routing Protocol in Delay-Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) provide message delivery services to users via intermittently connected nodes. In DTNs, routing is one of the most challenging issues since end-to-end connectivity between nodes may not be available most of the time. Although many routing protocols for DTNs have been proposed, they do not achieve satisfactory performance, since they exploit only some of the network characteristics. In this paper, we present a new DTN routing protocol, called the Link Contact Duration-based Routing Protocol (LCD). Like existing protocols, LCD uses the disconnect duration of a link between two nodes to find the routing path with the shortest end-to-end delay. In addition, LCD uses the contact duration of a link and the number of buffered messages to deliver as many messages as possible in a short time. Our simulation results show that LCD has better performance than existing DTN routing protocols.