An Efficient Buffer Management Policy for DTN

Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are challenged networks where an end-to-end path may not always exist, due to which it is necessary to use a store-carry-forward paradigm for routing messages from source to destination. DTNs have emerged from MANETs, inheriting their typical properties like mobility, network partitioning, sparse network structure, etc., differing in the inability to use IP. Due to the high mobility of nodes, and limited radio transmission range, two nodes may not always be able to communicate with each other. Thus, communication is established with the help of encounter opportunities between nodes. So intelligent relay selection plays an important role in routing performance. But apart from relay selection, effective buffer management policies also have an impact on routing performance. In this paper we have discussed existing buffer management methods in literature and proposed a novel buffer management scheme based on hop-count and TTL, which uses partial network knowledge. Experimental results show that the proposed buffer management scheme outperforms existing buffer management policies in terms of higher delivery rate and lower overhead ratio.