Delay tolerant Mobility Aware Routing/Mobility Dissemination Protocol for the airborne network

Despite “airborne network (AN) topology design” and careful planning of AN trajectories, unexpected disruptions (from hardware failures to changes in mission requirements and hostile attacks) may cause nodes not to connect to one another directly or indirectly either because they are out of one another's range or because nodes do not meet one another according to their preplanned trajectories. Since an end-to-end path within the AN is not always guaranteed, packets have to be delivered in a delay-tolerant fashion, namely, some intermediate nodes will need to buffer packets during times of disconnectivity. In our earlier work we developed Mobility Aware Routing Protocol and Mobility Dissemination Protocol (MARP/MDP) that used preplanned trajectories of airborne nodes to make intelligent routing decisions preemptively. In this paper we present a delay-tolerant strategy (MARP/MDP+DTN) to predict the minimum end-to-end delay and obtain the corresponding path. In addition, MARP/MDP+DTN accounts for local queueing (MARP/MDP+DTN+QC) to minimize congestion and further improves end-to-end delay with the positive side effect of load-balancing. Simulation results have shown an improvement of 52% in packet delivery ratio in MARP/MDP+DTN. MARP/MDP+DTN+QC also exhibits extremely short latency, about 90% reduction from MARP/MDP+DTN in highly congested network. Moreover, MARP+DTN+QC balances local traffic 67% better than MARP+DTN in high traffic load scenarios.