CALAR: Community Aware Location Assisted Routing Framework for Delay Tolerant Networks

Infrastructure less communication strategies have greatly evolved and found its way to most of our real life applications like sensor networks, terrestrial communications, military communications etc. The communication pattern for all these scenarios being identical i.e. encounter based communication; characteristics of each communication domain are distinct. Hence the protocols applied for each environment should be defined carefully by considering its own communication patterns. While designing a routing protocol the main aspects under consideration include delay, connectivity, cost etc. In case of applications having limited connectivity, concept of Delay tolerant network (DTN) is deployed, which assists delivering messages even in partitioned networks with limited connectivity by using store and forward mechanism. Node properties like contact duration, inter contact duration, location, community, direction of movement, angle of contact etc. may be used for designing different routing protocols for DTN. This paper introduces a new protocol that exploits the features of both community based as well as location based routing protocols to achieve higher data delivery ratio in vehicular scenarios. Simulation results obtained show that proposed algorithms have improved delivery ratio compared to existing routing algorithms which use any one of the above property