New spray and wait protocol with node activity in heterogeneous delay tolerant networks

The spray and wait protocol is a classic copy-limited spraying protocol in delay tolerant networks, in which, the binary spray mode can be improved for heterogeneous delay tolerant networks. In this article, a new conception of node activity was defined to weigh the importance of nodes in aspect of message dissemination in the whole network. A new spray and wait protocol with node activity was proposed to improve the performance in heterogeneous delay tolerant networks. A mathematical model used under varieties of the spraying protocols was also proposed to analyze the expected delay of the protocol. Simulations show that the spray token proportion with node activity is optimal and the new protocol is of better performance than other related protocols. Therefore, this protocol has high efficiency and good scalability.