Fair Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Abstract-The typical state-of-the-art routing algorithms for delay tolerant networks are based on best next hop hill-climbing heuristics in order to achieve throughput and efficiency. The combination of these heuristics and the social network structure leads the routing to direct most of the traffic through a small subset of good users. For instance, in the SimBet algorithm, the top 10% of users carry out 54% of all the forwards and 85% of all the handovers. This unfair load distribution is not sustainable as it can quickly deplete constraint resources in heavily utilized mobile devices (e.g. storage, battery, budget, etc.). Moreover, because a small number of users carry a significant amount of the traffic, the system is not robust to random failures and attacks.To overcome these inefficiencies, this paper introduces FairRoute, a routing algorithm for delay tolerant networks inspired by the social processes of perceived interaction strength, where messages are preferably forwarded to users that have a stronger social relation with the target of the message; and assortativity, that limits the exchange of messages to those users with similar "social status". We compare the performance of FairRoute to the state-of-the-art algorithms by extensive simulations on the MIT reality mining dataset. The results show that our algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in the de facto benchmark of throughput vs. forwards. Furthermore, it distributes better the load; the top 10% carry out 26% of the forwards and 28% of the handovers without any loss in performance.

Utilizing correlated node mobility for efficient DTN routing

“…While SPR delivers 65% of messages, CSPR delivers 82% of them when TTL of messages is set to 500 time units. Figure 5(f) compares the routing efficiency [32] of SPR and CSPR in all four traces. It shows an increase of 10%-22% in routing efficiency with the usage of CIT.…”

Increasing communication reliability in manufacturing environments

“…Recent work in disconnection tolerant networks was concerned with buffer management [19] [22][24] [14], replication management [18] [14] and distribution [15][22] [18]. [15] is a benchmark quota based routing protocol with replication that aims to forward more copies of a message to nodes that are core to the network but it does not check how fault prone these nodes are.…”

Fair content dissemination in participatory DTNs

“…To our knowledge, the only attempt to achieve fairness in DTNs, while reasoning on available battery, is FairRoute [47], a routing protocol that uses concepts from social sciences (e.g., interaction strength, social status) to select message carriers. By means of simulation using the MIT Reality Mining movement traces, the authors demonstrate that their protocol does achieve more fairness than protocols such as epidemic and SimBet [25], a routing protocol that chooses intermediaries based on betweenness centrality and probability of future interactions.…”

“…Benchmark. We compare CoHabit's performance in terms of both fairness and delivery ratio with FairRoute [47], the only other routing protocol which attempts to distribute load uniformly across the network. In its original formulation, FairRoute, which is based on SimBet [25], does not take time into consideration: it is thus possible, following the participation model described above, that nodes using FairRoute will forward many messages in short periods of time, causing their battery to drain all of a sudden, and consequently withdrawing from future cooperation.…”