Integrating Buffer Management with Epidemic Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Problem statement: The Design of Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocols has focused to operate in an environment where there is no guarantee of end to end path between source and destination at all points of time. The DTN research has focussed primarily on applications that are delay tolerant. But it can also be used to provide real time information like accident alert in VANETs and emergency alert in earth-quake monitoring applications. Such environment stimulates the need to introduce priority to messages and deliver them at the earliest according to the priority. Approach: In this study, an effective buffer management is proposed and integrated to epidemic routing to support delivery of real-time information at the earliest. In the proposed approach, an indexer, scheduler and dropper is used to perform the buffer management. Results and Conclusion: The performance of epidemic routing after integration is evaluated and compared with other policies in terms of metrics such as delivery ratio and delivery latency. The simulation results show that the approach presented performs well with an advantage of delivering real-time information at the earliest.