Enhancements of epidemic routing in delay tolerant networks from an energy perspective

In last years, the challenge of providing end-to-end service where end-to-end forwarding paths do not exist is faced by the new emerging approach of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), that support interoperability of "regional networks" by accommodating long delay between and within regional networks, such as space communications, networking in sparsely populated areas, vehicular ad-hoc networks and underwater sensor networking. The common issue of these environments consists in the absence of guarantees about the existence of continuous end-to-end paths between source and destination nodes. In this paper we consider epidemic schemes to solve this problem, proposing an extended approach aimed at the routing optimization in terms of energy consumption and message delivery probability. The performance of our idea have been evaluated through a deep campaign of simulations, verifying that the proposed extended epidemic approach leads the system to an overall enhancement. © 2013 IEEE.