On the implications of routing metric staleness in delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing addresses challenges of providing end-to-end service where end-to-end data forwarding paths may not exist. The performance of current DTN routing protocols is often limited by routing metric “staleness”, i.e., routing information that becomes out-of-date or inaccurate because of long propagation delays. Our previous work, ParaNets, proposed a new opportunistic network architecture in which the data channel is augmented by a thin end-to-end control channel. The control channel is adequate for the exchange of control traffic, but not data. In this paper we present Cloud Routing, a routing solution for the ParaNets architecture. We motivate the need for such a solution, not only because of stale routing metrics, but also because of congestion that can occur in DTNs. Unable to use up-to-date routing metrics to limit congestion, existing DTN routing solutions suffer from low goodput and long data delivery delays. We show how Cloud Routing avoids congestion by smart use of forwarding opportunities based on up-to-date routing metrics. We evaluate our solution using extensive OPNET simulations. Cloud Routing extends network performance past what is currently possible and motivates a new class of globally cognizant DTN routing solutions.