Packet Scheduling and Discard Policies for Diffusion Control in Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks

A Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) is characterized by scenarios where end-to-end connectivity is rarely available. Hence, in such networks, the use of existing ad hoc routing protocols may result on poor performance, since they rely on the existence of an end-to-end path between the source and destination nodes. This paper proposes a DTN routing strategy called DRAIN. Differently from other proposals based on Epidemic routing, DRAIN considers realistic scenarios where nodes’ buffer capacity and link bandwidth are limited. Our performance analysis demonstrates the inefficacy of the Epidemic approach in scenarios under such constraints. However, through a controlled packet diffusion and a quantitative packet deliver estimate, DRAIN is able to present good delivery rates in the same conditions, as well as a lower consumption of network resources.