Leapfrog: Optimal Opportunistic Routing in Probabilistically Contacted Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) experience frequent and long lasting network disconnection due to various reasons such as mobility, power management, and scheduling. One primary concern in DTNs is to route messages to keep the end-to-end delivery delay as low as possible. In this paper, we study the single-copy message routing problem and propose an optimal opportunistic routing strategy --- Leapfrog Routing --- for probabilistically contacted DTNs where nodes encounter or contact in some fixed probabilities. We deduce the iterative computation formulate of minimum expected opportunistic delivery delay from each node to the destination, and discover that under the optimal opportunistic routing strategy, messages would be delivered from high-delay node to low-delay node in the leapfrog manner. Rigorous theoretical analysis shows that such a routing strategy is exactly the optimal among all possible ones. Moreover, we apply the idea of Reverse Dijkstra algorithm to design an algorithm. When a destination is given, this algorithm can determine for each node the routing selection function under the Leapfrog Routing strategy. The computation overhead of this algorithm is only O(n^2) where n is the number of nodes in the network. In addition, through extensive simulations based on real DTN traces, we demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly outperform the previous ones.