A Survey on Buffer Management Architectures in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks are characterized by their lack of connectivity, resulting in a lack of instantaneous end-to-end paths. However, when such end-to-end paths are difficult or impossible to establish, an approach called store-carry-forward is used to route the message. Due to this approach the buffer storage required to store the messages is more. Hence the proper management of the buffer is necessary in such resource constrained environment for the nodes. This buffer management can be done by the proper use of the drop policy used to drop the message when buffer is full, scheduling policy to decide which message should be forward when contact opportunity arrives. This paper gives the survey of such buffer management architectures.