Hitchhiker: A Wireless Routing Protocol in a Delay Tolerant Network Using Density-Based Clustering

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocols have been studied by many researchers for areas that are densely populated but have no Internet access. Many researchers have studied and proposed DTN protocols that rely on social metrics such as individual encountering frequency or centrality of a node. In this paper, we propose a DTN routing protocol, Hitchhiker, that utilizes the power of the dense crowd. Hitchhiker uses a distributed method of (i) self-clustering of mobile nodes, (ii) disseminating a packet within a local wireless subnetwork to find its intended destination, and (iii) relaying the message to the border nodes to reach the destination. We use real world human trace from two social media platforms, Twitter and Instagram, to emulate people's movement in the simulation. We find that Hitchhiker exhibits a success rate of delivery comparable to other popular DTN protocols, and also achieves sufficiently low network overhead.