An Efficient Message Forwarding Scheme with Epidemic Routing Considering the Number of Stopover Nodes in Delay Tolerant Network Environment

This paper proposes an efficient message transmission method by direct short-range communications with mobile terminals based on epidemic routing. In a previous study, when a message packet arrives at its destination node, it floods the network with packets called “anti-packets,” and deletes packets with the same message in an effort to enhance the efficiency of the buffer memories of the other terminals. Because anti-packets are not issued until the message arrives at its destination, there is not an efficient termination process. In this paper, the timing to issue anti-packets is accelerated by observing the number of nodes that a message packets has gone through, allowing wasted message packets to be eliminated earlier. Computer simulations show that the proposed method improves the messagearrival rate and reduces the average time required for message arrival.