A routing protocol for considering the time variant mobility model in Delay Tolerant Network

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) has been emerged to support the network connectivity of the disruptive networks. A variety of routing methods have been proposed to reduce the latency for message delivery. PROPHET was proposed as a probabilistic routing that utilizes history of encounters and transitivity of nodes, which is computed as contact probability. While PROPHET improves the performance of DTN due to contact probability, contact probability is just one parameter reflecting the mobility pattern of nodes, and further study on utilizing contacting information of mobility pattern is still an important problem. Hence, in this paper, we try to improve routing for DTN by using a novel metric other than contact probability as mobility information. We propose the routing protocol to use mean residual contact time that describes the contact period for a given pair of nodes. The simulation results show that using the mean residual contact time can improve the performance of routing protocols for DTN. In addition, we also show in what situations the proposed method provides more efficient data delivery service. We characterize these situations using a parameter called Variation Metric.