Message Drop and Scheduling in DTNs: Theory and Practice

Abstract—In order to achieve data delivery in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN), researchers have proposed the use of store-carryand-forward protocols: a node there may store a message in its buffer and carry it along for long periods of time, until an appropriate forwarding opportunity arises. This way, messages can traverse disconnected parts of the network. Multiple message replicas are often propagated to further increase delivery probability. This combination of long-term storage and message replication imposes a high storage and bandwidth overhead. Thus, efficient scheduling and drop policies are necessary to: (i) decide on the order by which messages should be replicated when contact durations are limited, and (ii) which messages should be discarded when nodes’ buffers operate close to their capacity. In this paper, we propose a practical and efficient joint scheduling and drop policy that can optimize different performance metrics, such as average delay and delivery probabili...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TMC
• Authors: Amir Krifa, Chadi Barakat, Thrasyvoulos Spyropoulos
• Keywords: Logical Reasoning, Long Term Storage, Necessary Parameters, Performance Metrics, TMC 2012