A routing algorithm based on node selfishness and buffer management in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Recently, great efforts have been devoted to the research of routing algorithms in delay tolerant networks, but existing works mainly focus on the positive social properties to design routing algorithms, in which nodes are supposed to be willing to help others carry and forward messages, few involve the negative social properties, such as selfishness. However, in reality, the resources of mobile nodes are limited, and helping others to carry and forward messages result in resource depletion. Therefore, mobile nodes behave selfishly to some degree along with the available resources. Furthermore, different messages may belong to different service types with different priorities and compete for finite buffer room. In order to guarantee the quality of service, the issues of node selfishness and buffer management should be taken into account in routing algorithms. Consequently, by combining the social properties of node selfishness and degree centrality, we propose an innovative routing algorithm with the buffer management mechanism designed according to message priority. The extensive experiments with the real world traces are conducted and the corresponding simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can improve the message delivery probability with low network overhead, and performs better than existing routing algorithms.