Network coded routing in delay tolerant networks: an experience report

Abstract

In delay-tolerant networks, end-to-end routes are rarely available, and routing protocols must take advantage of the opportunistic interactions among nodes to deliver packets. Probabilistic routing performs well in such networks and has been the dominant focus of research in this area. However, creating efficient routing protocols is challenging because to reduce latency, one often needs to replicate messages thus increasing routing overhead. Network coding has been explored as a way to increase throughput in DTNs without a significant increase in overhead, and network coded routing approaches have shown promising results. In this paper, we report on our experience integrating both erasure coded and network coded routing into the well-adopted DTN2 Reference Implementation. We implement our routing module and evaluate it via small real-world field tests.