Optimal Forwarding Strategies for Delay Tolerant Networks with Multiple Classes and Beaconing Costs

Delay–tolerant networks (DTNs) are sparse and/or highly mobile wireless ad hoc networks which assure no continuous connectivity. One central problem in DTNs is is the routing of packets from a source towards the desired destinations. The literature provides a number of results for very restrictive scenarios in which mobile nodes have the same mobility characteristics and in which only forwarding costs are taken into account. In this work, we extend this result to more concrete situations in which mobile nodes have different mobility characteristics and can use different technologies and also beaconing costs are taken into account. In particular, we provide a greedy algorithm that find the source’s optimal forwarding policy in polynomial time and we provide some illustrations of our algorithm.