Title: Sociality-based comprehensive buffer management for multicast in DTNs

Authors: Xia Deng; Jianxin Wang; Le Chang

Addresses: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, Hunan, China; School of Computer Science and Education Software, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, 510006, Guangdong, China ' School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, Hunan, China ' Shannon Lab, Central Research Institute, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, 518129, Guangdong, China

Abstract: In delay tolerant networks (DTNs), multicast is widely adopted for emergency notification in crisis environments, or data scattering under military rescue situations, due to its robustness and high resource utilisation. Although the topology of DTNs is highly dynamic, they also demonstrate relatively stable social characteristics, e.g., the social centrality. In this paper, we propose a sociality-based comprehensive buffer management for multicast routing (SCBMR), where nodes with high social centrality are selected in priority as relay nodes. However, choosing nodes with high centrality may result in great transmission workload on these nodes, and consequently they have to drop messages frequently when the buffer space is limited. We thus design a corresponding buffer management strategy that drops the buffered messages with more replicas and shorter TTL in the network. This will save the buffer space for the messages that has not been well-distributed in the network. Through extensive simulation, we verify that SCBMR can increase the data delivery ratio significantly without compromising the transmission cost and delay.

Keywords: delay tolerant networks; DTNs; multicast routing; social centrality; buffer management; TTL; time-to-live; node priority; relay nodes; simulation; data delivery ratio.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2015.068382

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2015 Vol.7 No.2/3, pp.263 - 277

Received: 06 Sep 2013
Accepted: 02 Dec 2013
Published online: 01 Apr 2015 *

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