A study on DTN routing protocol for disaster situation while considering age of information

Abstract

It is well known that disasters make it more difficult to obtain information due to the failure of cell phone base stations and other pre-installed fixed infrastructure. In such situations, minimizing the damage caused by disasters also requires the collection of disaster-related information from affected areas. Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), a network technology that enables end-to-end communication, has attracted significant attention from network researchers. Accordingly, past DTN-based studies have aimed to collect as much disaster information as possible, even under unstable communication environments. However, these systems cannot handle situations where the target disaster information changes dynamically over time. To collect such information effectively, it is important to periodically retrieve target data at short intervals. Furthermore, in order to accurately understand the disaster situation, it is important to collect information under conditions that are as equitable as possible across all affected areas. According to the above background, this paper proposes TPR (Travel Path Relay) as a new DTN routing protocol for disaster information systems. TPR estimates relay nodes that are more likely to approach the destination, considering both information freshness and fairness, while maintaining a low number of message replications.