UAV-empowered Protocol for Information Sharing in VDTN

The Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a network architecture that plays an important role in intermittently connected networks. DTNs can support transmissions between clients even there are no end-to-end connections by using “store-carry-forward” mechanism, where some nodes called ferry nodes could be employed into DTN to enhance the network performance. In this paper, we use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to act as ferry nodes, and a probabilistic routing protocol based on the encounter connection time between nodes is proposed. The proposed protocol not only considers the efficiency of message transmission but also the reliability between connected nodes. The proposed protocol and some existing protocols are compared and analyzed using ONE simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol increases the delivery probability and reduces the average latency.