Selective Message Forwarding in Delay Tolerant Networks

It is challenging to deliver messages in a network where no instant end-to-end path exists, so called Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN). Node encounters are used for message forwarding. In this paper, the authors propose a DTN routing protocol SMART. SMART utilizes the travel companions of the destinations (i.e. nodes that frequently meet the destination) to increase the delivery opportunities while limiting the message overhead to a bounded number. The approach differs from a few related work in that it does not propagate node encounter history nor the delivery probabilities derived from the encounter history.