Drop Less Known strategy for buffer management in DTN Nodes

Certain kinds of delay and disruption tolerant networks need the human support to send data between users without a contemporaneous end-to-end path between them. However, humans are socially selfish and tend to cooperate with whom they have a social relationship, fact that affects the overall performance. Memory space is a critical resource on mobile devices, and since the intermediate nodes have to store the messages, buffer management strategy becomes a crucial factor to achieve a satisfactory network performance. Very little attention has been directed towards applying the social characteristics of the users to mitigate the congestion in DTN. This paper presents a buffer management strategy for DTNs that takes into account a value associated with the social relationship strength among the users. We evaluated this policy in conjunction with the Epidemic and PRoPHET routing algorithms. By means of a thoroughly planned set of steady-state simulation experiments, we found that the proposed scheme can increase the delivery rate besides decreasing the average delay.