Encounter based fuzzy logic routing in delay tolerant networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a newest class of networks that have the ability to provide connectivity to areas that are yet to be served by conventional networks. Routing in DTN is a tough task because nodes have no prior information about the partitioned network and transfer opportunities between peer nodes are limited. A node in a DTN delivers messages to the destination using the store and forward strategy. Messages are transmitted to multiple intermediate relay nodes encountered in order to increase the opportunity for the message to reach the destination. Encounter duration is the time period in which a pair or more mobile nodes move into the communication range of each other and hence are able to transfer messages between them. Since the node movements are arbitrary, the encounter duration is unpredictable. This research work proposes a novel encounter based fuzzy logic routing (EFLR) scheme to maximize message delivery with reduced overhead. The fuzzy based utility computation is used for finding a better node to forward messages as well as to drop messages from buffer. Simulation results reveal that EFLR performs better than other existing DTN routing protocols.