Performance Improvement of DTN Routing Protocols with Enhanced Buffer Management Policy

Abstract

Delay tolerant network (DTN) is one of the emerging technologies which is applied generally when there is no end-to-end path exists from source to destination all the time. The two major issues in DTN are routing and buffer management. Existing buffer management policies are based on one or more parameters such as message Time-to-Live, message age, message replication count, message size etc.,. There is no efficient approach is available for estimation of message replication count. In this work an efficient approach is proposed to estimate total number of copies of the message. The proposed buffer management approach prioritizes the messages and based on which the messages are forwarded/dropped from the buffer when there is a contact opportunity occurs/when the buffer is full. These priorities are based on message Time-to-Live, message age, message replication count and message size. This proposed buffer management policy is evaluated with two popular DTN routing protocols Spray-and-Wait and Prophet. The simulation results show that delivery probability of messages has increased with reduced buffer time average and minimized latency.