Scanning behavior for efficient energy consumption in delay tolerant network

Abstract

Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) is a sparse network of mobile wireless nodes which there is no end-to-end connectivity between nodes. DTN is used to provide communications in the extreme terrestrial environments, mobile environments, or in certain situations that it is impossible for infrastructure network to deliver data. In this paper, we will focus on how to utilize node power consumption in order to maximize the data delivery probability in various DTN environments. The main factor that responsible for the most consuming power is a scanning process to find nearby nodes. If nodes wasted too much energy to scan for other nodes unnecessarily, it would likely miss a transfer opportunity due to not having enough power left. Therefore, the goal is to minimize the amount of energy consumed during scanning process in order to reduce the overall node energy consumption while it can achieve the best delivery probability. The simulations show that node density is inverse to the amount of energy nodes used to scan for its neighbor nodes. The more nodes stay close to each other, the amount of time node uses to scan for others is reduced, hence less power consumption.