Adaptive Spraying for Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Message delivery in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) is challenging due to the fact that the network is intermittently connected. Mobility can be exploited to improve DTN performance. In this paper, we propose a DTN routing scheme Adaptive Spraying. Adaptive Spraying exploits mobility pattern and encounter history to predict the number of nodes with no copy a node will encounter within the expected delay. The number of nodes encountered can be viewed as the number of copies disseminated. Each node with copies dynamically chooses the number of copies by itself, instead of a fixed number determined at the source node. We present an analysis of the scheme and validate the analytical results with simulations. Simulation results show that Adaptive Spraying performs well over a variety of environmental conditions such as transmission range and traffic load.