A Probabilistic Interest Forwarding Protocol for Named Data Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) were designed to allow delayed communications in mobile wireless scenarios where direct end-to-end connectivity is not possible. Nodes store and carry packets, deciding whether to forward them or not on each opportunistic contact they eventually establish in the near future. Recently, Named Data Networking (NDN) have emerged as a completely new paradigm for future networks. Instead of being treated as source or destination identifiers, nodes are viewed as consumers that express interests on information or producers that provide information. Current research is carried on the combination of these two concepts, by applying data-centric approach in DTN scenarios. In this paper, a new routing protocol called PIFP (Probabilistic Interest Forwarding Protocol) is proposed, that explores the frequency of opportunistic contacts, not between the nodes themselves, but between the nodes and the information, in order to compute a delivery probability for interest and data packets in a Named Data Delay Tolerant network (ND-DTN) scenario. The protocol design and a prototype implementation for The ONE Simulator are both described. Simulation results show that PIFP presents significant improvements in terms of interest satisfaction, average delay and total cost, when compared to other ND-DTN approaches recently proposed.