A Reed-Solomon Based Method to Improve Message Delivery in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks are made up of mobile wireless nodes which may experience major message delivery restrictions. Such restrictions are the result of intermittent connectivity and scattered topology. Within these networks, messages can be detained for long periods of time or never be delivered. Existing solutions that purport improved message delivery rates modify routing protocols to perform integrity verification with each hop, resulting in routing overhead and, very often, unnecessary processing costs. This article proposes a scheme, named EMCOD, which decreases message delivery delay, while minimally increasing the processing overheads. To achieve this, EMCOD uses data encoding and interleaving to create messages. The original data is reassembled from some of the messages received, without the need to wait for all messages to be received. In scenarios subject to long delays and/or significant packet loss rates, it is possible to reduce original data recovery times by more than 50%. The processing overhead resulting from the encoding procedures is offset by the data recovery capabilities, which effectively decreases network overheads by more than 60%, in the same scenarios. EMCOD modifies the Bundle Layer, without interfering with the remaining layers, making it possible to route the messages through nodes that do not implement the proposed scheme.