Improving delivery delay in social-based message forwarding in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Friendship and Selfishness Forwarding (FSF) is an algorithm for DTN environments that takes into account two social characteristics of the candidate nodes to relaying messages: the friendship and the individual selfishness. In this paper we adopt DLK, a buffer management policy based on the social relationship strength [5], instead of the Drop Oldest (DO) buffer management strategy previously used. Since the original version of FSF did not deliver 40% of the messages on the average, we try reduce this rate considering the cases in which the relay drops the message because the message TTL expires. We evaluate this situation by using a very large TTL value assigned to each message. Preliminary trace-driven simulations results show that, after these improvements, the FSF algorithm delivers more messages, because DLK keeps in the buffer messages that the relay can deliver in future contacts. The difference between the results, though, are still not statistically negligible, so there is space for further deeper investigation.