Restricted Epidemic Routing Method in Large-Scale Delay-Tolerant Networks

Abstract

In delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTNs), Epidemic routing is theoretically a highly reliable and low-latency message forwarding protocol, but its high consumption of network resources is a key issue that restricts the protocol application. In large-scale network application scenarios, the overhead of flooding-based message forwarding is unacceptable, which increases wireless transmission conflicts among nodes. This paper proposes a restricted Epidemic routing scheme. Aiming at the heterogeneity of nodes in the network, some nodes are planned in advance to construct a limited-scale forwarding node group to control resource conflicts and overhead caused by message flooding. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the overhead ratio at a small cost of delivery success ratio, and when the nodes in the forwarding node group have stronger communication capabilities and move faster, the loss of the delivery success ratio is smaller.