Routing-aware fair contact plan design for predictable delay tolerant networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) have become a promising solution for extending Internet boundaries to challenged environments such as satellite constellations. In this context, strategies to exploit scarce communication opportunities, while still considering device and application constraints, are still to be investigated to enable the actual deployment of these networks. In particular, the Contact Graph Routing (CGR) scheme has been proposed as it takes advantage of the contact plan, which comprises all future contacts among nodes. However, resource constraints can forbid the totality of these contacts to belong to the contact plan; thus, only those which together meet an overall goal shall be selected. In this article, we consider the problem of designing a contact plan that can provide fairness in link assignment and minimal all-to-all route delay; therefore, achieving equal contact opportunities while favoring end-to-end traffic latency. We formalize this by means of a multi-objective optimization model that can be computationally intractable for large topologies; thus, heuristic algorithms are proposed to compute the contact plan in practice. Finally, we analyze general results from these routines and discuss how they can used to provision valuable contact plans for real networks.