A multi-attribute-based data forwarding scheme for delay tolerant networks

Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) is a challenging problem due to the absence of an end-to-end path between source-destination pairs of nodes, as well as limited resources on each node such as remaining energy levels or buffer space. The majority of existing DTN forwarding schemes mostly forward messages based on the node’s past encountered record to more popular nodes in order to maximize delivery ratio and reduce delivery delay, but do not take into consideration the energy and buffer utilization concurrently when selecting relay nodes. Additionally, forwarding a greater number of messages to a few popular nodes can easily cause early resource exhaustion, leading to more message delay or loss. To address this issue, we propose a new message forwarding scheme that considers the current service level, available buffer space, and remaining energy level of nodes to choose the most suitable relay nodes for message forwarding with the goal of achieving a desired delivery ratio within the deadline. Through a performance evaluation, we demonstrate that our proposed routing approach performs better than comparable routing schemes in terms of message delivery ratio before deadline expiration and the number of dead nodes, especially in scenarios where nodes have limited resources such as energy and storage capacity.