Utility-Based Distributed Routing in Intermittently Connected Networks

Intermittently connected mobile networks don’t have a complete path from a source to a destination at most of the time. Such an environment can be found in very sparse mobile networks where nodes meet only occasionally or in wireless sensor networks where nodes always sleep to conserve energy. Current transmission approaches in such networks are primarily based on: multi-copy flooding scheme and single-copy forwarding scheme. However, they incur either high overheads due to excessive transmissions or long delay due to possible incorrect choices during forwarding. In this paper, we propose a A Utility-based Distributed routing algorithm with Multi-copies called UDM, in which a packet is initially replicated to a certain number of its neighbor nodes, which sequentially forward those packets to the destination node based on a probabilistic routing scheme. Some buffer management methods are also proposed to further improve its performance. Theoretical analyze and simulations show that compared to Epidemic routing, Spray and Wait routing, UDM routing scheme provides a nearly optimal delay performance with a stable packet arrive rate in the community mobility model.