Modern Internet protocols demonstrate inefficient performance in those networks where the connectivity between end nodes has intermittent property due to dynamic topology or resource constraints. Network environments where the nodes are characterized by opportunistic connectivity are referred to as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Highly usable in numerous practical applications such as low-density mobile ad hoc networks, command/response military networks and wireless sensor networks, DTNs have been one of the growing topics of interest characterized by significant amount of research efforts invested in this area over the past decade. Routing is one of the major components significantly affecting the overall performance of DTN networks in terms of resource consumption, data delivery and latency. Over the past few years a number of routing protocols have been proposed. The focus of this thesis is on description, classification and comparison of these protocols. We discuss the state-of-the-art routing schemes and methods in opportunistic networks and classify them into two main deterministic and stochastic routing categories. The classification is based on forwarding decisions in routing methods adopted with or without the knowledge about the network topology and nodes trajectories. The protocols in each class have their own advantages and shortcomings.
In the stochastic routing protocols category, simple flooding-based protocols are feasible approaches in those networks where there is a little or no information about the network topology and there is no resource restriction. Epidemic routing is a flooding- based protocol relying upon the distribution of messages through the networks to deliver information to their destinations.
To demonstrate the performance of the epidemic routing protocol for information delivery in networks with intermittent connectivities, we provide several simulation experiments and show that this protocol with reasonable aggregate resource consumption, ensures eventual message delivery in networks, using minimal assumptions regarding nodes trajectories, network topology and connectivity of underlying networks and only based on sufficient number of random pair-wise exchanges of messages among mobile nodes.
In the following, we introduce the recently proposed network coding concept and discuss coding-based information delivery advantages in wireless networks. Network coding is a recently introduced paradigm to efficiently disseminate data in wireless networks in which data flows coming from multiple sources are combined to increase throughput, reduce delay, and enhance robustness against node failures. Finally, we present some simulation experiments to show the superiority of network coding for information delivery in wireless networks, compared to pure flooding-based mechanisms. /Kir1
