Understanding and Developing a Dynamic Manycast Solution for DTNs

With the recent proliferation of wireless communication devices, intermittent connectivity on the edge will quickly become a reality. These disruption tolerant networks derive structure from human-based interaction and mobility, and hence group-based routing is both a natural and important paradigm for applications. In this work, we introduce and explore the concept of manycast routing, where the goal is to reach at least k members of a group of size m. This very general paradigm inherently includes other groupbased routing concepts such as anycast and multicast. Efficiently handling manycast requests at the routing layer allows for both feasible and flexible manycast applications. Our manycast exploration takes a three pronged approach. First, the relative difficulty of manycast requests is quantified via analysis, which greatly deepens our theoretical knowledge of how challenging the general paradigm is in a DTN environment. Second, to understand how different replicationbased classes of DTN routing protocols respond to and handle manycast requests, extensive simulations are performed in multiple types of network environments. These results show that any DTN manycast protocol must dynamically react on a per-message basis by drastically changing their routing approach, in order to achievemaximum results. Third, using the conclusions drawn from the analysis and simulation results, we present a DTN manycast meta-protocol that selects the appropriate routing technique based on the current request and network conditions.