EA-PRoPHET: An Energy Aware PRoPHET-Based Routing Protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks

In a Delay Tolerant Network (DTN), nodes are intermittently connected. In order to deliver a message from a source node to a destination node, the message is copied and forwarded to an intermediate node when the connection between the nodes is established. The node that receives the message stores it and forwards the copy of it to another node it encounters. The process is repeated until the destination node is encountered or the message's life time expires. PRoPHET (Probabilistic Routing Protocol using History of Encounters and Transitivity) is one of the major DTN routing protocols. However, PRoPHET does not consider energy consumption of nodes. Energy consumption of mobile wireless devices has been a major issue recently as the devices are ubiquitously used. In this paper, we propose an Energy Aware PRoPHET that considers energy of nodes and available free buffer of nodes for storing forwarded messages. We extensively simulated our proposal and have shown that our proposed routing performs far more better than PRoPHET in terms of energy consumption, extension of network life, message delivery probability and overhead ratio.