An Efficient Routing Protocol for DTN

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are different from the conventional ad hoc networks as they support information exchange in the presence of long latency in end to end path availability. Hence, they use store-carry-forward approach for message exchange unlike other ad hoc networks that use carry-forward approach. As DTNs have evolved from MANETs, they inherit many properties of MANETs, like sparse structure, mobility, network partitioning etc. However, route discovery in DTNs is more challenging because of above mentioned difference. Therefore, routing in DTNs is an interesting topic of research. As end to end path availability is not guaranteed the nodes communicate in opportunistic manner. The performance of store carry forward approach is heavily dependent on the probability of availability of path and storage space at the node. Therefore, we have proposed a probabilistic method of routing using efficient buffer management. The performance of proposed protocol has been evaluated with the help of simulation experiments.