Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) - Improved Routing with MaxProp and the Model of "Transfer by Delegation" (Custody Transfer)

In this paper, we address the problem of routing in delay tolerant networks (DTN). In such networks there is no guarantee of finding a complete communication path connecting the source and destination at any time, especially when the destination is not in the same region as the source, which makes traditional routing protocols inefficient in that transmission of the messages between nodes. We propose to combine the routing protocol MaxProp and the model of “transfer by delegation” (custody transfer) to improve the routing in DTN networks and to exploit nodes as common carriers of messages between the network partitioned. To implement this approach and assess those improvements and changes we developed a DTN simulator. Simulation examples are illustrated in the article.