A One-Hop Information Based Geographic Routing Protocol for Delay Tolerant MANETs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geographic routing protocol for delay tolerant MANETs that uses only one-hop information, improving delivery ratio and reducing hop count compared to existing schemes under low mobility conditions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel one-hop information based geographic routing protocol with a utility function and redundancy mechanism for delay tolerant MANETs.

Findings

Outperforms Epidemic, Spray and Wait, FirstContact in delivery ratio.

Reduces average hop count in low mobility scenarios.

Maintains acceptable overhead levels.

Abstract

Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) may lack continuous network connectivity. Routing in DTNs is thus a challenge since it must handle network partitioning, long delays, and dynamic topology. Meanwhile, routing protocols of the traditional Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) cannot work well due to the failure of its assumption that most network connections are available. In this article, a geographic routing protocol is proposed for MANETs in delay tolerant situations, by using no more than one-hop information. A utility function is designed for implementing the under-controlled replication strategy. To reduce the overheads caused by message flooding, we employ a criterion so as to evaluate the degree of message redundancy. Consequently a message redundancy coping mechanism is added to our routing protocol. Extensive simulations have been conducted and the results show that when node moving speed is relatively low, our routing protocol outperforms the other schemes such as Epidemic, Spray and Wait, FirstContact in delivery ratio and average hop count, while introducing an acceptable overhead ratio into the network.