Congestion control in delay tolerant networks with selfish nodes

The Delay Tolerant Network architecture is an effective solution for the reliable message delivering in intermittent networks employing a store and forward approach. The messages are relayed hop by hop from the source to the destination. Congestion in such networks is mainly resulted from limited buffer space to store the relayed messages. Furthermore, the selfish nodes that are reluctant to share its buffer for storing others' messages worsen the congestion of data flow. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion control management solution named Incentive Multi-paths Routing with Alternative Storage (IMRAS). IMRAS firstly initializes multi-paths routing to mitigate link load; then it establishes rules to bestir selfish nodes to store and forward messages; at last it selects alternative nodes with available storage to store data which would otherwise be dropped given buffer exhaustion. Simulation results show that IMRAS improves the performance of routing algorithms in selfish DTNs significantly.