COMFA: Exploiting Regularity of People Movement for Message Forwarding in Community-based Delay Tolerant Networks

It is well known that the daily movement of people exhibits a high degree of repetition in which people usually stay at regular places for their daily activities [1]. It is also believed that people usually stay in a social community [2]. In this paper, we exploit the regular movement patterns of community members to design a new routing protocol called COMFA, which forwards messages of mobile nodes carried by community members. Particularly, COMFA utilizes the regular movement patterns of community members to construct the routing table and provides a decentralized solution to maximize the message delivery probability while preserving the message delivery deadline. We evaluate and compare the performance of COMFA protocol with Prophet routing protocol and Epidemic routing protocol over the real data set of 100 mobile nodes collected by 9 participants in the same research group at the University of Illinois campus. The experiment results show that COMFA outperforms other alternatives by improving the message delivery considerably while reducing the message overhead significantly.