Utilizing correlated node mobility for efficient DTN routing

In a delay tolerant network (DTN), nodes are connected intermittently and the future node connections are mostly not known. Therefore, effective forwarding based on limited knowledge of contact behavior of nodes is challenging. Most of the previous studies assumed that mobility of a node is independent from mobility of other nodes and looked at only the pairwise node relations to decide routing. In contrast, in this paper, we analyze the temporal correlation between the meetings of each node with other nodes and utilize this correlation for efficient routing. We introduce a new metric called conditional intermeeting time (CIT), which computes the average intermeeting time between two nodes relative to a meeting with a third node. Then, we modify existing DTN routing protocols using the proposed metric to improve their performance. Extensive simulations based on real and synthetic DTN traces show that the modified algorithms perform better than the original ones.