Socially-Aware Adaptive Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocol

Abstract

Network partitioning and node disconnectivity results in high latency and frequent link disruption in DTNs. Therefore, routing a message toward a destined node is a challenge in such environment. Several DTN routing schemes have been introduced in this regard. Some, recently proposed DTN routing protocols either use a single or combination of multiple social metrics to identify the suitable forwarder node(s). However, these DTN routing protocols produced results at the expense of community formation cost and over utilization of network resources. To address these issues, we propose Socially-Aware Adaptive DTN (SAAD) routing scheme which exploits a social attribute known as Degree Centrality (DC). In this scheme, each node calculates and shares its DC with other nodes at regular intervals. A forwarder node disseminates message to the most influential node possessing highest DC. The proposed routing scheme works great in situations where someone want to improve the energy efficiency and want to involve only relevant nodes. The simulation results show that SAAD has improved to select the best node and has reduced the hop-count, overhead on the expense of delay as compared to Epidemic, PRoPHET and PRoPHETv2.