Research on data receiving and delivering in networks with long delays

Abstract

An ad-hoc network is formed by a group of mobile hosts upon a wireless network interface. In the sparse mobile ad-hoc networks (SMANET), continuous end-to-end path between source and destination nodes, precedent condition of the traditional communication technology, may never exist. The disconnected or discontinuously connected networks and high link error rates pose a new set of challenges. The usual way to deal with this problem is to let the mobile computer wait for network reconnection passively, which may lead to unacceptable transmission delays. Although long range communication can be used to establish the link between nodes, it leads to rapid draining of nodes' limited batteries. In this paper, a kind of improved message relaying approach is proposed. Besides the function of route discovering, this approach is designed to realize data receiving and delivering (DRD) in networks with long delays. The data are stored and forwarded by the node chosen in the "node-choosing" procedure. With the help of the nodes' mobility, data can be relayed hop by hop from the source node (SN) to the destination node (DN). Consequently, the source node and the destination node can communicate to each other indirectly. It is believed that this scheme is useful for applications that require urgent message delivery and collect data in wild regions, such as emergency relief or field operations.