Routing in delay tolerant networks with periodic connections

In delay tolerant networks (DTNs), the network may not be fully connected at any instant of time, but connections occurring between nodes at different times make the network connected through the entire time continuum. In such a case, traditional routing methods fail to operate because there are no contemporaneous end-to-end paths between sources and destinations. This study examines the routing in DTNs where connections arise in a periodic nature. We analyze various levels of periodicity in order to meet the requirements of different network models. We propose different routing algorithms for different kinds of periodic connections. Our proposed routing methods guarantee the earliest delivery time and minimum hop-count, simultaneously. We evaluate our routing schemes via extensive simulation experiments and compare them to some other popular routing approaches proposed for DTNs. Our evaluations show the feasibility and effectiveness of our schemes as viable routing methods for delay tolerant networks.