Energy Efficient Social-Based Routing for Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is one kind of emerging networks characterized by long delay and intermittent connectivity. Traditional ad hoc routing protocols are inapplicable or perform poorly in DTNs because nodes are seldom fully connected. In recent years, many routing protocols (especially social-based routing) are proposed to improve the delivery ratio in DTNs, but most of them do not consider the load of nodes thus may lead to unbalanced energy consumption among nodes. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Social-based Routing (EESR) protocol to reduce the load of nodes while maintaining the delivery ratio within an acceptable range by limiting the chances of forwarding in traditional social-based routing. Furthermore, we also propose an improved version of EESR to dynamically adjust the controlling parameter. Simulation results on real-life DTN traces demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms.