Prioritization of Traffic for Resource Constrained Delay Tolerant Networks

In networks with common shared wireless medium, the available bandwidth is always valuable and often scarce resource. In addition to it, memory available at nodes (eg., sensor nodes) might be limited relative to the amount of information that needs to be stored locally. As Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) rely on node mobility for data dissemination, the high node mobility limits the duration of contact. Besides the issue of contact opportunities between nodes, the bandwidth, available storage at peering nodes and contact duration also affect data forwarding. These factors also influence the mechanisms such as buffer replacement and scheduling policies. So there are secondary problems that routing strategies may need to take care of such as to deal with limited resources like buffer, bandwidth and power. Furthermore, despite inherent delay tolerance of most DTN driving applications, there can be situations where some messages may be more important than the others and expected to get delivered earlier. So considering the network limitations and application requirements, the problem of choosing the messages to be transmitted when a contact opportunity arises and the messages to be dropped when buffer full is formulated. A buffer management policy to address these issues is proposed and analysed in this paper. Additionally the buffer utilization of various DTN routing protocols and the impact of buffer size on the performance of DTN are studied