Performance Comparison of Multicasting Approaches in Disruption Tolerant Networks

Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are emerging solutions to networks that experience frequent partitions. In this paper, we study how to provide high-performance multicasting service in DTNs. We first investigate three basic DTN multicast approaches. We then develop a multicast mechanism based on on-demand path discovery and overall situation awareness of link availability (OS-multicast) to address the challenges of opportunistic link connectivities in DTNs. Performance of different DTN multicast approaches are evaluated by simulations, including tests that use trace files of practical DTN experiments. Simulation results show that OS-multicast can achieve a better message delivery ratio than existing approaches with smaller delays in multiple scenarios. OS-multicast also achieves better message delivery efficiency performance when the link unavailability becomes large and the lack of network connectivity becomes severe.

Technical Report LU-CSE-06-020, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, 2006.

Back to Brian Davison's publications