Location and Direction Aware Priority Routing for Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are a class of emerging networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions. Delay is inevitable in DTNs, thus, ensuring the validity and integrity of the message and making better use of buffer space are more important than concentrating on how to decrease the delay. In this paper, we present a routing protocol named Location and Direction Aware Priority Routing (LDPR) for DTNs, which utilizes the location and moving direction of nodes to deliver a message from source to destination. A node can get the location and moving direction of other nodes by receiving beacon packets periodically from anchor nodes and referring to received signal strength indicator (RSSI) for the beacon. LDPR contains two schemes named transmission scheme and drop scheme, which take advantages of the nodes’ information of the location and moving direction to transmit the message and store the message into buffer space, respectively. Each message, in addition, is branded a certain priority according to the message’s attributes (e.g. importance, validity, security and so on). The priority decides the transmission order when delivering message and the dropping sequence when the buffer is full. Simulation results show that the proposed LDPR outperforms the conventional protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio and routing overhead. In particular, LDPR is able to guarantee the validity and integrity of the message. We expect LDPR to be of greater value than other existing solutions in highly disconnected and mobile networks.