Spread and Erase: Efficient Routing Algorithm Based on Anti-Message Info Relay Hubs for Delay Tolerant Networks

Absence of end-to-end connectivity of nodes in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) posses a challenge towards designing an efficient routing protocol for these networks. In DTNs with nodes having unlimited buffer sizes, Epidemic routing [16] provides an optimal solution in terms of message delivery ratio and message latency but it suffers with disadvantage of large message overhead ratio. Epidemic routing with Vaccination system (EVS) proposed by [18] improves the problem of message overhead ratio in epidemic routing by immunizing the system from duplicate message copies. We compared EVS with other routing techniques in terms of message overhead where multiple sources communicating with a single destination and observed that it performs better. In this paper we propose a routing algorithm that further minimizes the message overhead ratio of EVS and improves in both message delivery ratio and message latency. In DTNs, special nodes called Message Ferry and Data Mule have been proposed to carry data from a source node to a destination node. We propose in this paper special node called anti-message Info relay hub to erase duplicate message copies instead of routing. We compare our algorithm with EVS and social grouping based algorithm [2] for social as well as non-social scenarios and show using simulation results that our routing algorithm ‘Spread and Erase with anti-message Info relay hubs’ outperforms in both scenarios.