Augment delay tolerant networking routing to extend wireless network coverage

Abstract

Cellular networks and Wi-Fi provide range of wireless communication services. They are the practical wireless technologies for domestic and business wireless users currently. However, base station (BS)/access point (AP) may fail in disasters. This failure problem may cause part of users not able to communicate. To solve this problem, one proposed solution is to let users in failure caused coverage hole self-organize to communicate to each other or to functional BS/AP. Delay Tolerate Networking (DTN) is one of such user self-organization technologies. This paper designs and evaluates geographic binary spray and wait routing algorithm (G-BSW) in DTN to let users find routes to close BSs/APs. Meanwhile, BS/AP load balance can be guaranteed. G-BSW is a cooperative algorithm. It controls BSs/APs to broadcast metadata to users to let them find appropriate BS/AP. The metadata contains geographic and related routing information. Through simulation in an open source DTN simulator (ONE simulator), G-BSW is validated to improve message delivery rate, and BS/AP load balance.