Using Neighborhood Beyond One Hop in Disruption-Tolerant Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores extending neighborhood awareness beyond immediate contacts in disruption-tolerant networks, showing that a 3-4 hop neighborhood view enhances routing efficiency with manageable overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a neighborhood-based routing approach that considers multi-hop vicinity, improving forwarding performance over traditional contact-based methods.

Findings

Limiting neighborhood view to 3-4 hops balances performance and overhead.

Extended neighborhood information significantly improves routing efficiency.

Tradeoff exists between monitoring cost and routing performance.

Abstract

Most disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) protocols available in the literature have focused on mere contact and intercontact characteristics to make forwarding decisions. Nevertheless, there is a world behind contacts: just because one node is not in contact with some potential destination, it does not mean that this node is alone. There may be interesting end-to-end transmission opportunities through other nearby nodes. Existing protocols miss such possibilities by maintaining a simple contact-based view of the network. In this paper, we investigate how the vicinity of a node evolves through time and whether such information can be useful when routing data. We observe a clear tradeoff between routing performance and the cost for monitoring the neighborhood. Our analyses suggest that limiting a node's neighborhood view to three or four hops is more than enough to significantly improve forwarding efficiency without incurring prohibitive overhead.