AntProPHET: A new routing protocol for delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Network is a network that supports the intermittent connections between nodes. There is either no end to end connection between the source and the destination or the connections are infrequent and very short in terms of delay. The mechanism called store-carry-forward cames to solve this problem, since the nodes are dynamic and facilitate the meeting of the other mobil nodes so they can receive and/or deliver messages to their final destinations. Hence, traditional routing which is based on the principle of end to end is no longer practical for this kind of environment. Different routing protocols have been proposed for DTN environment, such as Epidemic, Spray and Wait and ProPHET. The common objective of these routing protocols is the increasing of the delivery ratio of messages with a minimal overhead. This paper proposes a routing strategy named AntProPHET, which combines probabilistic metric of ProPHET routing protocol and Ant colony optimization algorithm which is inspired by the foraging behavior of Ants and their ability to find the shortest path from a food source and their nest. We use the ONE simulator in order to verify the performance of AntProPHET compared to the ProPHET. Simulation results will show that the proposed AntProPHET approach improves significantly the delivery ratio of messages and reduce the overhead generated. So, our approach AntProPHET is a good applicantion to be used in DTN environments.