Group Based Epidemic Routing for Delay and Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Delay and Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been proposed to address data communication challenges in network scenarios, where no instantaneous end-to-end path is guaranteed because of frequent and long duration network partitions. Typical protocols forward a message to multiple nodes to improve message delivery rate. However, a large number of replications consume many system resources that are quite limited in such scenarios. Group Based Epidemic Routing (G-Epidemic) is proposed in this paper to reduce the number of replications by limiting the range of message "infection" of Epidemic. Nodes are divided into different groups, and the "epidemic" only happens within certain groups. Simulation results show that G-Epidemic performs better than both Epidemic and PROPHET in the community scenario. It is able to deliver more messages, but the amount of replications drops in a big degree.