A Novel Forwarding Scheme for Adaptive Anycasting in Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networks

Delay/disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs) are characterized by frequent and long duration partitions and end-to-end connectivity may never be present between the source and the destination at the message origination time. Anycast is an important service used for many applications in DTNs such as information exchange in hazards/crisis situation, resource discovery etc. In this paper, we propose classification of DTNs into three subcategories, namely: networks utilizing message ferries (MFN), interplanetary networks (IPN) and intermittently connected mobile Ad hoc networks (ICMAN). Further, we propose a novel anycasting scheme for ICMANs called receivers based forwarding (RBF), which considers the number of anycast receivers available through a link as well as the path length to the nearest receiver through that link in deciding the next hop while forwarding an anycast bundle. Simulation results with respect to link availability, group size and buffer size show that the RBF performs better than the shortest path forwarding (SPF) in term of data delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and overall data efficiency.