A Fuzzy Logic-Based Routing for Delay-Tolerant Heterogeneous Networks

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is an intermittently connected mobile wireless network in which the connectivity between nodes changes frequently due to nodes' movement. Recently, there have been a lot of researches working on this area. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has addressed on the DTN routing which focuses on the heterogeneous network environment in the literature. In this work, we propose a prediction based routing protocol for the heterogeneous delay tolerant networks wherein edge servers are distributed over the borders of the different network domains. A location prediction algorithm based on the user online logs to intelligently estimate the most possible future location of the destination, if the destination is currently unavailable. Then an edge server selection algorithm based on fuzzy logic system is exploited to select the close-by intermediate node on the path to the destination so that the messages can be saved temporarily for the destination after the location of the destination is predicted. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed routing protocol can efficiently deliver the message under limited buffer space, comparing with two representative delay tolerant network routing protocols in the literature. The scalability of the proposed work is also confirmed in the simulations.