Balanced Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) often have a highly dynamic network topology. Even if we could accurately predict the movement of all nodes in the network, it is still difficult to find a routing algorithm for maximizing the network performance of a DTN. This is due to the unavailability of load information across the network. In this paper we consider the problem of balanced routing in DTNs in order to improve the overall network performance. We propose a routing algorithm called ABC, which tries to make the best use of limited buffers of the nodes by balancing the buffer usage across the network. Trace-driven simulation results show that our algorithm performs well under a wide range of network configurations (delivery ratio can be improved by up to 15%).