A probability based adaptive multicast routing scheme for delay tolerant networks

Many Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) applications need multicast service, thus making efficient multicast communication support essential. In this paper, we propose a Probability-based Adaptive Multicast Routing scheme (PAMR) to address the challenges of intermittent link connectivity and frequent partitions in DTNs. PAMR relies on node encounter histories rather than the global knowledge or the summary of link states of the network topology, which makes PAMR be more flexible and practical than the existing multicast routing schemes. Furthermore, PAMR can handle different DTNs application scenarios by adjusting network parameters. Extensive simulations have been conducted to verify the performance of PAMR and the results indicate that the PAMR scheme can achieve a higher bundle delivery ratio and incur much smaller end-to-end delay at the cost of comparatively lower delivery efficiency.