Intelligent Dynamical Buffer Scheduling Mechanism for Intermittently Connected Mobile Network

According to the store-carry-forward packet transmission method, nodes can communicate with each other in intermittently connected mobile network flexibly. As can be seen, the successful transmission of packets is assisted by multiple copies injected into the network. Therefore, the limited buffer should be utilized reasonably in this situation. In this paper, an adaptive buffer scheduling mechanism is proposed with the aid of packet transmission status estimation. According to the activity degree of node and the number of packet copies, the status of packet transmission in the network can be evaluated. Furthermore, with the estimated outcome of packet redundancy, the packets in the buffer are scheduled dynamically. Numerical results show that the activity degree can be estimated accurately, especially when the networks become larger. The number of packet copies can be proved that it follows normal distribution. Compared with other buffer scheduling mechanisms, our mechanism displays better performance, e.g., the packet delivery probability is enhanced by 21–50 %, and the latency is reduced by 15–23 %.