Erasure-Coding Based Routing for Opportunistic Networks
Introduction
Most current approaches for routing in DTN are based on sending multiple identical copies of packages over different paths. There is always a tradeoff between overhead and delay. The flooding algorithm, for example, has the best delay, but the worst overhead. The direct algorithm on the other side has the worst delay but the best overhead. We present an erasure coding based algorithm, that achieves a better worst-case delay performance than existing approaches with a fixed overhead.
Erasure Codes
Erasure Codes convert a message into a large number of code blocks so, that any sufficient large subset of this blocks can be used to reconstruct the message. In more detail, if an erasure code has a message of size and a replication factor as input, it produces equal sized code blocks of size . Any code blocks can be used to reconstruct the message. So only code blocks are needed.
Erasure coding based routing(ec)
The algorithm we present is a enhancement of the simple replication algorithm (srep). Is srep with replication factor , the source sends identical copies of the message over contacts. This contacts may only send directly to the destination. In the erasure coding based algorithm (ec) the sender generates a large number of codes blocks and distributes them over relays, for some constant . This uses times more relays than srep, but each relay only carries times data. So ec uses the same number of bytes as srep. Because code blocks are needed to reconstruct the message, relays have to deliver their data successfully. For ec is the same as srep.
Benefits
In srep relays are used and one has to succeed. In ec relays are used but relays must succeed to reconstruct the message. If the number of low delay relays is larger than ec will deliver the message with a lower delay than srep.If is large, the delay distribution converges to a constant. Therefore ec has almost a constant delay.