Particle swarm optimization in intelligent routing of delay-tolerant network routing

Abstract

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless partitioned networks. Because of intermittency, mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols are not efficient in DTNs. Wildlife tracking, vehicular networks, interplanetary networks, etc. are different applications of DTN. Regarding DTN applications, different parameters should be considered while designing DTN routing protocols. Message delivery ratio, message delivery delay, overhead, message drop, etc. are some important factors that are usually considered in routing algorithms. This paper proposes a method which tries to reduce overhead and message drop while increasing message delivery ratio. Choosing the appropriate number of message copies to distribute in the network is important. Few numbers of copies can lead to message drop. So, the message cannot be delivered to the destination. On the other hand, increasing the number of copies causes overhead increase in the network. The proposed algorithm uses particle swarm optimization (PSO) in intelligent choosing of number of message copies. Regarding message delivery ratio and network overhead, PSO greatly helps in finding the suitable number of copies. In order to evaluate our method, which is called PSODTN, we compared it with epidemic routing (ER) and probabilistic routing protocol using history of encounters and transitivity (PROPHET). PSODTN helps to reduce overhead, on average, 95.6% compared to ER and PROPHET. While reducing overhead, PSODTN message delivery ratio is on average 98%.