Message significance based buffer management policy for DTN

An efficient buffer management policy was proposed to cope with the quite limited storage space in delay and tolerance networks (DTN). The significance value for each message is calculated according to its life time and the distribu-tion of its replications. The message which has most replications and least life time will be given the biggest significance value, and vice versa. When the transmission opportunity occurs, the message with biggest significance value will be forwarded first, and when there is no enough room to accommodate new messages, the message with a smallest significance value will be discarded to free buffer space. The method can fairly route the messages of the network to achieve higher delivery rate. Simulation results show that the proposed policy performs better than the most common existing ones.