Mail Man Ferry: A Novel Routing Protocol in Intermittently Connected Networks

Abstract

As an important area for mobile wireless networks, Intermittently Connected Networks (ICNs) have received increasing attention in practice and research in recent years. The main goals of the ICN routing protocol are to maximize the delivery probability and to minimize the delivery delay. These challenges have been investigated in previously proposed protocols with an assumption of fully cooperating nodes. Node cooperation directly impacts ICN performance in terms of delivery probability and delay. However, node cooperation is not guaranteed because a cooperating node consumes its buffer size and energy, thereby highlighting the challenges of memory, computation, and energy efficiencies. This paper addresses the challenge of ensuring node cooperation by proposing a novel routing protocol called Mail Man Ferry (MMF). The new protocol includes a node credit mechanism that ensures the cooperation of the network nodes. Extensive simulations were executed to evaluate the proposed protocol. Varying values of node cooperation in ICNs were employed in the simulation tests. The evaluation shows exciting results in which Mail Man Ferry outperforms previously proposed ICN protocols.