An Epidemic Routing with Low Message Exchange Overhead for Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Epidemic routing strategy enables mobile nodes in Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN) to send messages to destinations without requiring any predetermined path between source nodes to destination nodes. However, it can cause a large number of message exchanges and consequently degrades network performance. In this article, we propose a novel epidemic routing strategy called the Epidemic Message with Message List Advertisement (EM-MA) that exploits broadcasting nature of wireless medium and slotted time communication to reduce network congestion and nodes’ energy consumption without affecting the message delivery time. Additionally, we conduct intensive simulations to demonstrate and compare the performance of EM-MA with other existing routing strategies. The results show that EM-MA outperforms the existing routing strategies and is suitable to be used in DTN.