CISER: An Amoebiasis inspired Model for Epidemic Message Propagation in DTN

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are sparse mobile networks, which experiences frequent disruptions in connectivity among nodes. Usually, DTN follows store-carry-and forward mechanism for message forwarding, in which a node store and carry the message until it finds an appropriate relay node to forward further in the network. So, The efficiency of DTN routing protocol relies on the intelligent selection of a relay node from a set of encountered nodes. Although there are plenty of DTN routing schemes proposed in the literature based on different strategies of relay selection, there are not many mathematical models proposed to study the behavior of message forwarding in DTN. In this paper, we have proposed a novel epidemic model, called as CISER model, for message propagation in DTN, based on amoebiasis disease propagation in human population. The proposed CISER model is an extension of SIR epidemic model with additional states to represent the resource constrained behavior of nodes in DTN. Experimental results using both synthetic and real-world traces show that the proposed model improves the routing performance metrics, such as delivery ratio, overhead ratio and delivery delay compared to SIR model.