Enhanced Epidemic Routing Protocol in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

A delay-tolerant network is a network designed to operate over extreme distances such as those encountered in space communications, borderline networks or on an interplanetary scale. Delay tolerant networks are the opportunistic networks, that is transmission occurs as soon as two intermediate nodes comes into each others transmission range. The commonly used routing algorithm in delay tolerant networks is Epidemic Routing Protocol (ERP). Epidemic routing floods away the packets to all the neighboring nodes, which sometimes results in network congestion. The ERP doesn't take into account the factors such as battery energy level and buffer space, so in the proposed research work, an enhanced version of ERP is hereby proposed which when deployed enables the node to consider battery energy level and buffer space while taking routing decisions. The proposed changes have resulted in the increase in message delivery ratio and decrease in traffic in the network.