Augur: A Delay Aware Forwarding Protocol for Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) are characterized by the absence of continuous connectivity resulting in high delivery delays that may exceed the acceptable limit for practical applications. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing Augur. Augur is a new routing protocol for DTNs targeted to minimize delays of message delivery. The routing scheme benefits from the spatiotemporal history data of the nodes to route messages only through gateways having less expected delay to deliver a message to its destination. We demonstrate through a comparative evaluation that Augur outperforms the state of the art DTN protocols in terms of delivery probability, overhead ratio and latency. We found that at low traffic rates Augur reduces the overhead ratio by up to 94%, and by up to 88% at high traffic. We also observed that the improvement in latency was reduced by up to half over the existing protocols in both traffic rates while still improving the delivery probability of messages.