Multidimensional routing protocol in human-associated delay-tolerant networks

Abstract

Human-associated delay-tolerant networks (HDTNs) are new networks where mobile devices are associated with humans and can be viewed from multiple dimensions including geographic and social aspects. The combination of these different dimensions enables us to comprehend delay-tolerant networks and consequently use this multidimensional information to improve overall network efficiency. Alongside the geographic dimension of the network, which is concerned with geographic topology of routing, social dimensions such as social characters can be used to guide the routing message to improve not only the routing efficiency for individual nodes, but also efficiency for the entire network. We propose a multidimensional routing protocol (M-Dimension) for the human-associated delay-tolerant networks which uses local information derived from multiple dimensions to identify a mobile node more accurately. The importance of each dimension has been measured by the weight function and it is used to calculate the best route. The greedy routing strategy is applied to select an intermediary node to forward message. We compare M-Dimension to the existing benchmark routing protocols via MIT reality Data Set and INFOCOM 2006 Data Set, which are real human-associated mobile network trace files. The results of our simulations show that M-Dimension significantly increases the average success ratio with a competitive end-to-end delay when compared with other multicast DTNs routing protocols. © 2002-2012 IEEE.