An Efficient Message Dissemination Scheme for Minimizing Delivery Delay in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a kind of sparse and highly mobile wireless networks, where no stable connectivity guarantee can be assumed. Most DTN users have several points of interest (PoIs), and they enjoy disseminating messages to the other users of the same PoI through WiFi. In DTNs, some time-sensitive messages (disaster warnings, search notices, etc.) need to be rapidly propagated among specific users or areas. Therefore, finding a path from the source to the destination with the shortest delay is the key problem. Taking the dissemination cost into consideration, we propose an efficient message dissemination strategy for minimizing delivery delay (MDMD) in DTNs, which first defines the user’s activeness according to the transiting habit among different PoIs. Furthermore, depending on the activeness, an optimal user in each PoI is selected to constitute the path with the shortest delay. Finally, the MDMD with inactive state (on the way between PoIs) is further proposed to enhance the applicability. Simulation results show that, compared with other dissemination strategies, MDMD achieves the lowest average delay, and the comparable average hopcounts, on the premise that the delivery ratio is guaranteed to be 100% by the sufficient simulation time.