Efficient Routing in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks: The Multiple-Copy Case

摘要

To deal with such networks researchers have suggested to use flooding-based routing schemes. While flooding-based schemes have a high probability of delivery, they waste a lot of energy and suffer from severe contention which can significantly degrade their performance. Furthermore, proposed efforts to reduce the overhead of flooding-based schemes have often been plagued by large delays. With this in mind, we introduce a new family of routing schemes that “spray” a few message copies into the network, and then route each copy independently towards the destination. We show that, if carefully designed, spray routing not only performs significantly fewer transmissions per message, but also has lower average delivery delays than existing schemes; furthermore, it is highly scalable and retains good performance under a large range of scenarios.