Adaptive Anycast: A New Anycast Protocol for Performance Improvement in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are characterized by frequent and long duration partitions and end-to-end connectivity may never be present between the source and the destination at the message origination time. Anycast is an important service used for many applications in DTN such as information exchange in hazards/crisis situation, recourse discovery etc. In this paper we study anycasting for a specific type of DTN, where the mobile nodes are sparsely distributed, communicating via low radio range, experience frequent and long duration partition and end-to-end path may not be present at the time of message generation. We also propose a Receiver Based Forwarding (RBF) scheme for anycasting in DTN, which considers the path length as well as the number of receivers in forwarding the anycast bundle to the next hop. NS simulation results show that the RBF performs better than the normal forwarding (NF) in term of data delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and overall data efficiency because the probability of available receivers increases.